I see it with my iPhone 3gs. I think the problem is that the slot on the new phone provides a visual reference that makes it easy to demonstrate the issue. But while I found with a friend's iPhone 4 that the signal loss seems to go away if I shift my hand slightly so as not to press on the slot, I can't seem to find a comfortable hand position that eliminate signal loss on my 3gs.
Just had the opportunity to try it with a friend's new iPhone. Pressing my thumb over the slot uncomfortably hard cause a dramatic drop in the signal. Holding it normally in my left hand with the pad of my thumb over the slot cause the loss of 1-2 bars, which went away if I adjusted my hand up by a few millimeters to clear the slot. I lose about 1 bar when holding my iPhone 3gs, exept that in that case I can't seem to get the bar back by adjusting my hand.
Hardly seems like a huge issue. I'm still in the market for a new iPhone once I become eligible to get one without a surcharge (besides, I was planning to buy a bumper anyway, just for the protection).
Are people actually reporting an increased frequency of dropped calls with normal use? I haven't seen any report that actually measured the frequency of dropped calls with normal use. I've seen anecdotal reports that it's a lot better, and a few saying its worse. The only report that seemed to do a careful job of lookeing at the signal strength issue (the Anandatech one) says that it's it's better, but even that author does not provide any kind of real statistics for both phone models under a range of signal conditions.
Based on the Anandatech report, a reasonable interpretation is that the external antenna design gives much better sensitivity, with the downside that with an unfavorable hand position, it degrades to something approaching the sensitivity of the earlier model iPhones with internal antennas.
Actually, there is no "correct" way to relate signal strength to number of bars, because there is no industry standard. What likely has happened is that Apple's original algorithm does not have sufficient dynamic range for the new iPhone, which is far more sensitive than their earlier models. Worse, the old algorithm exaggerates the impact of changes in signal strength due to hand contact , and makes people think that it is worse than the old model, when it's actually better even with hand contact. Apple probably doesn't want say, "we originally chose an algorithm different from the one that AT&T recommends to make the original iPhone look better," so instead they are "shocked, shocked" to discover the "mistake."
Considering that when the iPhone was first released, 100% of purchasers were new users, the percentage could hardly help but decrease. And if buyers are satisfied, and increasing percentage will necessarily be previous iPhone owners who are due to upgrade (and people whose contracts are up, and who might have switched to Droid, but did not.
Considering that the rate of sales of the iPhone 4 is currently limited by supply rather than demand, comparing the number of new users per day is not very meaningful.
I agree that sales of the iPhone are being constrained by the limitation to one carrier. For example, my sister wanted to upgrade, and would have liked to buy an iPhone, but she is tied into Verizon by a family plan that includes multiple other phones. So she settled for a Droid. She says that it is nice, but not as good as an iPhone, so when Verizon offers the iPhone, she will likely switch to that.
So not only is the iPhone experience so compelling that previous owners are rushing to upgrade as soon as the new one announced, but something like 25% of new purchasers are people who own another brand, but have so much trust in Apple that they are rushing to buy a new iPhone without even waiting until the reviews are in.
And this means that the iPhone is well on its way to being a niche device?
Still, I expect that the most widely selling phones will remain "commodity phones" with razor-thin profit margins. Apple is unlikely to enter this market, so the iPhone will probably never be the biggest seller.
Yes, SOME phones have problems with dropped calls when held from the bottom.
And SOME people don't have any problems with the iPhone 4 losing signal when they hold it at the bottom. It likely depends upon your individual skin conductivity regardless of whether it's an iPhone or a Droid.
I still have an iPhone 3gs, but this had me trying to remember when was the last time I saw somebody other than me using an iPhone without a case. I don't use a case myself, but one of the reasons I'm interested in the iPhone 4 (once AT&T lets me upgrade without paying a penalty) is that I like the "bumper case" design.
If seeing in 3D depending matching convergence and focus, then 3D displays wouldn't work for anybody, nor would binoculars. The reason 3D displays, binoculars, and older 3D technologies like the stereoscopedo work is that your brain identifies similar elements in the field of view, and assumes that they are different perspectives on the same object. Focus provides only minor hints, and only for objects up close. This is why your depth perception can easily be confused by repetitive patterns like chain link fences, or those "Magic Eye" pictures, where your eye ends up converging the "wrong" images, ignoring focus cues.
I agree. Sounds like complete nonsense, and not supported by the paper referred to, which describes "simulator sickness," something that occurs with even non-3D first person displays (probably because the first-person display gives you the impression that you are moving, while your inner ear keeps saying that you aren't--sort of the converse of sea/air sickness where your inner ear tells you that your are moving, but your eyes tell you that you aren't).
Could 3D displays cause strabismus in young children? On first principles, it seems very unlikely. Strabismus is when your eyes fail to converge to merge the two views of a 3D image. On a 3D display, your eyes are converging to merge two stereoscopic views--which is exactly what they do in real life. In fact, I'd say that it is more likely that 3D displays would cure strabismus than cause it. And so far, nobody has shown any actual evidence that they can cause it.
On the other hand, Nintendo has to protect themselves. The very fact that somebody has suggested that 3D displays could harm vision, no matter how flimsy the rationale, puts Nintendo at risk of being sued by anybody whose kid uses the product and develops visual problems of any kind. Dow Chemical was driven into bankruptcy by lawsuits claiming that the implants caused serious health problems, even though there was strong scientific evidence that it wasn't true. So Nintendo will put a warning on the product, and if anybody tries to sue, Nintendo's lawyers can say, "you chose to use the product even though we warned you."
So you acknowledge that aside from your obvious bias against the iPhone, your only evidence for a uniquely severe problem with the new iPhone is an observation that reception is affected by hand position, something that we know just from the basic physics (and a statement by an antenna engineer) must be true to some extent for any phone with an internal antenna.
Is it really? Have you never gotten a poor connection on another phone? How do you know that it was not because your hand was covering the antenna? Did you try experimenting with hand position to get a better connection?
Agreed. The Magic Mouse is the best mouse I've ever used.
But whether you like an Apple mouse depends heavily on your mousing style. Apple mice are designed for people who control their mouse with a light touch of their fingertips. People who like to rest their palm on the mouse tend to prefer a more "mounded" design, and find the flat, low-profile Apple mice uncomfortable.
Any cell phone will show some signal degradation depending upon hand position, because your hand is a bag of salt water and it absorbs RF. So far, nobody has shown that the "hand effect" is any worse with the new iPhone than with any other cell phone with an internal antenna, much less "absolutely disastrous." It may just be that there is a visible cue that makes it easier to figure out what the "worst case" hand position happens to be. Of course, it also means that it is easier to figure out how to hold your phone for best reception when signal strengh is marginal.
While there are certainly people who love everything Apple does, it is obvious from your post and others that there are just as many looking for any excuse to attack Apple.
This is just buying into the hype. Apple came out with a new phone that happens to have the highest pixel density yet (325 ppi). The next closest is the Motorola Droid at 265 ppi. About 20% higher than the competition
I suppose...for a 1-dimensional display with a single line of pixels.
But for a 2-dimensional display, we measure pixel density in points per square inch, so that works out to about a 50% higher density.
So hypothesis 1: You are a freak of nature, able to hear frequencies about 10 kHz higher than has been documented for human beings.
Or hypothesis 2: The med tech's equipment was operating improperly, producing lower frequency distortion, or he made an error in reporting the results.
No scalable font will look perfectly clear at a size where the lines and spaces within the characters are close to the width of the pixels. To get really sharp text that tiny, you need a font bitmap designed specifically for that size and resolution (and which will look crappy at any other size). This is actually how the original black-and-white screen Mac worked--each font had a set of bitmaps that were hand-optimized for that particular size and screen resolution. But the resolution of the new iPhone is so high that such a tiny font would be too small to read, anyway, so why bother?
"Fragile X syndrome is associated with autism, though the conditions do not map directly to each other."
Yes, I bet they don't.
A "DUH" moment. Fragile X syndrome is associated with autism in humans. It does not map directly to classical autism because there are additional symptoms that are not always present in autism, and most people with autism do not have the fragile X genetic defect.
So it is not clear whether a drug that cures fragile X in humans would help most autistic people.
Animal experiments are scientific fraud. I laugh at the way that the Slashdot crowd, who think they are intelligent, are merely parrotting whatever bullshit the paid for media tells them.
92% of drugs which pass animal experiments, FAIL human experiments, (AKA 'clinical trials').
This is stupid. Pharmaceutical companies are businesses. They care about the bottom line. Do you really think that pharmaceutical companies would use animal models for drug discovery if they did not work? Do you really imagine that 8% of randomly selected chemical compounds would be effective in treating humans? Eight percent is doing extremely well. The role of animal testing is not to verify with certainty that a drug will work in humans, but rather to filter out the overwhelming majority of drugs that do not work in either humans or animals. Generations of research have shown that the biochemical effects of a drug are almost always similar in humans or animals. If a drug does not work as desired in animals, the likelihood that it will work in humans is negligible. Ultimately, there are certainly subtleties of human biology that require testing in humans. But if the most toxic molecules were not already filtered out by animal testing, the risks of human testing would be so great that drug testing would be ethically unacceptable for anything other than terminal diseases (and perhaps not even those).
Human testing will ultimately be necessary to determine whether a drug that cures symptoms of Fragile X in animals will cure autistic symptoms of Fragile X in humans, much less autism in general, because autism is a behavioral syndrome that relates to unique human behaviors. But the chances are much better for a drug that successfully treats the symptoms of fragile X that are recognizable in animals, rather than for a random chemical. And even if it only treated the other symptoms of fragile X, it would still be valuable
Yes, in the interests of keeping file sizes reasonable, I've done some testing, so I know that I personally can readily see the difference between 150 dpi and 300 dpi at a comfortable reading distance, even when nicely antialiased, but I cannot distinguish 300 dpi from higher resolutions.
When I was young, my hearing limit tested a bit better than 19 kHz. These days it's more like 14 kHz.
So yes, these are the practical limits. Doubtless a few people can do better, or in very favorable conditions (nose to the screen, extremely loud sounds).
Slashdot Mirror
I see it with my iPhone 3gs. I think the problem is that the slot on the new phone provides a visual reference that makes it easy to demonstrate the issue. But while I found with a friend's iPhone 4 that the signal loss seems to go away if I shift my hand slightly so as not to press on the slot, I can't seem to find a comfortable hand position that eliminate signal loss on my 3gs.
Just had the opportunity to try it with a friend's new iPhone. Pressing my thumb over the slot uncomfortably hard cause a dramatic drop in the signal. Holding it normally in my left hand with the pad of my thumb over the slot cause the loss of 1-2 bars, which went away if I adjusted my hand up by a few millimeters to clear the slot. I lose about 1 bar when holding my iPhone 3gs, exept that in that case I can't seem to get the bar back by adjusting my hand.
Hardly seems like a huge issue. I'm still in the market for a new iPhone once I become eligible to get one without a surcharge (besides, I was planning to buy a bumper anyway, just for the protection).
Are people actually reporting an increased frequency of dropped calls with normal use? I haven't seen any report that actually measured the frequency of dropped calls with normal use. I've seen anecdotal reports that it's a lot better, and a few saying its worse. The only report that seemed to do a careful job of lookeing at the signal strength issue (the Anandatech one) says that it's it's better, but even that author does not provide any kind of real statistics for both phone models under a range of signal conditions.
Based on the Anandatech report, a reasonable interpretation is that the external antenna design gives much better sensitivity, with the downside that with an unfavorable hand position, it degrades to something approaching the sensitivity of the earlier model iPhones with internal antennas.
Actually, there is no "correct" way to relate signal strength to number of bars, because there is no industry standard. What likely has happened is that Apple's original algorithm does not have sufficient dynamic range for the new iPhone, which is far more sensitive than their earlier models. Worse, the old algorithm exaggerates the impact of changes in signal strength due to hand contact , and makes people think that it is worse than the old model, when it's actually better even with hand contact. Apple probably doesn't want say, "we originally chose an algorithm different from the one that AT&T recommends to make the original iPhone look better," so instead they are "shocked, shocked" to discover the "mistake."
We know that all phones will have this issue to some extent--it is an inescapable consequence of the physics of RF and antennas. But it will not be a problem for some people, because it will also depend upon their individual electrical properties. Whether the frequency of such problems is any greater for the iPhone than for other phones remains to be seen. For example, Ars Technica reported "We were able to reproduce this problem consistently once we learned the proper technique for "cupping" the phone—before watching a video how to do this, several of us on staff were unable to just figure out on our own how to make this happen...During our testing, this did not seem to affect our actual phone calls outside of when we were explicitly trying to degrade the signal.".
Considering that when the iPhone was first released, 100% of purchasers were new users, the percentage could hardly help but decrease. And if buyers are satisfied, and increasing percentage will necessarily be previous iPhone owners who are due to upgrade (and people whose contracts are up, and who might have switched to Droid, but did not.
Considering that the rate of sales of the iPhone 4 is currently limited by supply rather than demand, comparing the number of new users per day is not very meaningful.
I agree that sales of the iPhone are being constrained by the limitation to one carrier. For example, my sister wanted to upgrade, and would have liked to buy an iPhone, but she is tied into Verizon by a family plan that includes multiple other phones. So she settled for a Droid. She says that it is nice, but not as good as an iPhone, so when Verizon offers the iPhone, she will likely switch to that.
So not only is the iPhone experience so compelling that previous owners are rushing to upgrade as soon as the new one announced, but something like 25% of new purchasers are people who own another brand, but have so much trust in Apple that they are rushing to buy a new iPhone without even waiting until the reviews are in.
And this means that the iPhone is well on its way to being a niche device?
Still, I expect that the most widely selling phones will remain "commodity phones" with razor-thin profit margins. Apple is unlikely to enter this market, so the iPhone will probably never be the biggest seller.
And SOME people don't have any problems with the iPhone 4 losing signal when they hold it at the bottom. It likely depends upon your individual skin conductivity regardless of whether it's an iPhone or a Droid.
I still have an iPhone 3gs, but this had me trying to remember when was the last time I saw somebody other than me using an iPhone without a case. I don't use a case myself, but one of the reasons I'm interested in the iPhone 4 (once AT&T lets me upgrade without paying a penalty) is that I like the "bumper case" design.
If seeing in 3D depending matching convergence and focus, then 3D displays wouldn't work for anybody, nor would binoculars. The reason 3D displays, binoculars, and older 3D technologies like the stereoscope do work is that your brain identifies similar elements in the field of view, and assumes that they are different perspectives on the same object. Focus provides only minor hints, and only for objects up close. This is why your depth perception can easily be confused by repetitive patterns like chain link fences, or those "Magic Eye" pictures, where your eye ends up converging the "wrong" images, ignoring focus cues.
I agree. Sounds like complete nonsense, and not supported by the paper referred to, which describes "simulator sickness," something that occurs with even non-3D first person displays (probably because the first-person display gives you the impression that you are moving, while your inner ear keeps saying that you aren't--sort of the converse of sea/air sickness where your inner ear tells you that your are moving, but your eyes tell you that you aren't).
Could 3D displays cause strabismus in young children? On first principles, it seems very unlikely. Strabismus is when your eyes fail to converge to merge the two views of a 3D image. On a 3D display, your eyes are converging to merge two stereoscopic views--which is exactly what they do in real life. In fact, I'd say that it is more likely that 3D displays would cure strabismus than cause it. And so far, nobody has shown any actual evidence that they can cause it.
On the other hand, Nintendo has to protect themselves. The very fact that somebody has suggested that 3D displays could harm vision, no matter how flimsy the rationale, puts Nintendo at risk of being sued by anybody whose kid uses the product and develops visual problems of any kind. Dow Chemical was driven into bankruptcy by lawsuits claiming that the implants caused serious health problems, even though there was strong scientific evidence that it wasn't true. So Nintendo will put a warning on the product, and if anybody tries to sue, Nintendo's lawyers can say, "you chose to use the product even though we warned you."
Here is a report of a similar phenomenon on the iPhone 3gs
So you acknowledge that aside from your obvious bias against the iPhone, your only evidence for a uniquely severe problem with the new iPhone is an observation that reception is affected by hand position, something that we know just from the basic physics (and a statement by an antenna engineer) must be true to some extent for any phone with an internal antenna.
Is it really? Have you never gotten a poor connection on another phone? How do you know that it was not because your hand was covering the antenna? Did you try experimenting with hand position to get a better connection?
Agreed. The Magic Mouse is the best mouse I've ever used.
But whether you like an Apple mouse depends heavily on your mousing style. Apple mice are designed for people who control their mouse with a light touch of their fingertips. People who like to rest their palm on the mouse tend to prefer a more "mounded" design, and find the flat, low-profile Apple mice uncomfortable.
Cell phones of all brands drop calls all the time. What is your evidence that none of those dropped calls are due to a finger in the wrong place?
Any cell phone will show some signal degradation depending upon hand position, because your hand is a bag of salt water and it absorbs RF. So far, nobody has shown that the "hand effect" is any worse with the new iPhone than with any other cell phone with an internal antenna, much less "absolutely disastrous." It may just be that there is a visible cue that makes it easier to figure out what the "worst case" hand position happens to be. Of course, it also means that it is easier to figure out how to hold your phone for best reception when signal strengh is marginal.
While there are certainly people who love everything Apple does, it is obvious from your post and others that there are just as many looking for any excuse to attack Apple.
I suppose...for a 1-dimensional display with a single line of pixels.
But for a 2-dimensional display, we measure pixel density in points per square inch, so that works out to about a 50% higher density.
So hypothesis 1: You are a freak of nature, able to hear frequencies about 10 kHz higher than has been documented for human beings.
Or hypothesis 2: The med tech's equipment was operating improperly, producing lower frequency distortion, or he made an error in reporting the results.
Hmmm...hard one.
No scalable font will look perfectly clear at a size where the lines and spaces within the characters are close to the width of the pixels. To get really sharp text that tiny, you need a font bitmap designed specifically for that size and resolution (and which will look crappy at any other size). This is actually how the original black-and-white screen Mac worked--each font had a set of bitmaps that were hand-optimized for that particular size and screen resolution. But the resolution of the new iPhone is so high that such a tiny font would be too small to read, anyway, so why bother?
So it's not "truly portable" if you have to hold it in both hands, so it's right in front of you?
Because hardly anybody wants to play a portable game system that way...
I would no more drive a car immediately after playing a racing game than I would drive a car after having a couple of drinks.
A "DUH" moment.
Fragile X syndrome is associated with autism in humans. It does not map directly to classical autism because there are additional symptoms that are not always present in autism, and most people with autism do not have the fragile X genetic defect.
So it is not clear whether a drug that cures fragile X in humans would help most autistic people.
This is stupid. Pharmaceutical companies are businesses. They care about the bottom line. Do you really think that pharmaceutical companies would use animal models for drug discovery if they did not work? Do you really imagine that 8% of randomly selected chemical compounds would be effective in treating humans? Eight percent is doing extremely well. The role of animal testing is not to verify with certainty that a drug will work in humans, but rather to filter out the overwhelming majority of drugs that do not work in either humans or animals. Generations of research have shown that the biochemical effects of a drug are almost always similar in humans or animals. If a drug does not work as desired in animals, the likelihood that it will work in humans is negligible. Ultimately, there are certainly subtleties of human biology that require testing in humans. But if the most toxic molecules were not already filtered out by animal testing, the risks of human testing would be so great that drug testing would be ethically unacceptable for anything other than terminal diseases (and perhaps not even those).
Human testing will ultimately be necessary to determine whether a drug that cures symptoms of Fragile X in animals will cure autistic symptoms of Fragile X in humans, much less autism in general, because autism is a behavioral syndrome that relates to unique human behaviors. But the chances are much better for a drug that successfully treats the symptoms of fragile X that are recognizable in animals, rather than for a random chemical. And even if it only treated the other symptoms of fragile X, it would still be valuable
Yes, in the interests of keeping file sizes reasonable, I've done some testing, so I know that I personally can readily see the difference between 150 dpi and 300 dpi at a comfortable reading distance, even when nicely antialiased, but I cannot distinguish 300 dpi from higher resolutions.
When I was young, my hearing limit tested a bit better than 19 kHz. These days it's more like 14 kHz.
So yes, these are the practical limits. Doubtless a few people can do better, or in very favorable conditions (nose to the screen, extremely loud sounds).
Yes, a foot is awful close. I also normally hold my phone (or other reading materials) about 18" away. I imagine that's pretty typical.