http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477924 jobs did exactly what I thought they would do. Change perception, not reception.
They actually did the opposite, they didn't change 1 bar to display 5, but 5 bars to display less.
Apple letter about iPhone 4
111–120 of 145 posts
Re: Apple letter about iPhone 4
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anand doesn't mention it explicitly, and neither do you, but I'm assuming that signal to noise ratio drops when you short the iPhone 4 antennae too otherwise his conclusion doesn't make sense: "At the end of the day, Apple should add an insulative coating to the stainless steel band, or subsidize bumper cases. It's that simple."
An insulative coating? We're talking about signals in the 850 to 2300 MHz range - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitive_coupling anyone?
I don't know what that means.
Apple has claimed not touching the black gap or using a case helps. Random people online seem to think that sticky tape or nail polish can fix the problem. Anand seems to think some thin layer of diamond would do the job too.
Are you saying it wouldn't work? And if not could you explain why not, and what would be needed?
Re: Apple letter about iPhone 4
#113Finally, can we all accept that it's bars and not reception we were ever talking about. Every single iPhone 4 user has had their phone for less than a month.
So return it already, don't sue.
Re: Apple letter about iPhone 4
#114Maybe I'm missing something, but if the problem is just the software that displays the number of bars, why does the iPhone 4 drop more bars than other iPhones which are running the same software? It seems like there's still a problem with the antenna design that was just made more obvious by the software.
I think what's obviously going on is that Apple was deliberately displaying more bars in areas where there was week signal in an act of deception to try and make up for AT&T's crappy network.
Re: Apple letter about iPhone 4
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are far more people and bloggers bitching about the Antenna issue, so it's become Apple's biggest priority. Just give it time, these issues have a way of getting solved.
i hear you. the part that irks me is that in the year since the time of 3GS release, this passed QA for call making . while we give them more time now, we suffer the affected calls. maybe Gary Powell was the guy in charge of making sure calls worked properly
Ever since the first iPhone was launched I've made sure to complain very little about it. Do you remember how bad smart phones were before Apple entered the game? I do, I went through about 5 before getting an iPhone. I'm astonished these devices do everything they do, to be completely honest. Little issues like these don't get me down.
Re: Apple letter about iPhone 4
#116What a strange coincidence. Just after releasing a phone that uses a metal ring all around the chassis as an antenna (which is something that perplexed every engineer living outside of the reality distortion field as soon as they saw the first pictures of the phone), they discovered that they've always used the wrong algorithm to calculate the signal strength.
yeah. what they were saying is that AT&T's suggested method to calculate bars is better, but that they went ahead and displayed more bars in week areas to give the illusion of signal strength.
Re: Apple letter about iPhone 4
#117I imagined the signal to UI representation would be a fairly standard algorithm. I'm surprised this issue didn't come up in their testing.
Then again, I really don't know how complicated this can be. It just seems like there have been enough phones released that did (perceivably) display the bars correctly that this should be a non-issue.
Re: Apple letter about iPhone 4
#118This makes no sense to me. Maybe I'm ignorant, but it sounds a lot like going to a mechanic because your car keeps turning off and they offer a new paint job to fix the issue.
I don't know if this is really the case or not, but what Apple is saying is more like going to a mechanic because your gas gauge keeps dropping to E when you hold the steering wheel a certain way, and the mechanic informs you that your gauge has been reporting more gas than you actually had _for several years_.
But its only been reporting more gas than you actually had _for several years_ because Apple chose to lie to you in 2008 to make AT&T's network look better than it is.
Re: Apple letter about iPhone 4
#119This doesn't seem to jive with AnandTech's testing which ignored the bars completely and installed some software to read the signal strength directly. Their conclusion was that the iPhone 4 had better reception overall than the 3GS for various reasons, (a fact which Apple seem to be clinging to like a life raft) but that the external antennae was still faulty even when held "normally" and if fixed would make a major…
furthermore, this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03PQyWp0mWE displays calls being dropped when the iPhone 4 is held in the death grip, not just a drop in bars.
More apple marketing bull and pointing fingers.
Re: Apple letter about iPhone 4
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that Anandtech's conclusion is out of place with the rest of their article, even if you take into consideration the shorting of the antennae. The iPhone 4 loses 24.6dB of signal strength when cupped at the bottom vs 17.7dB for the Nexus one. If Apple should be required to add an insulative coating to the stainless steel, then shouldn't Google also be required to make their phone thicker (or make other…
I believe losing 24dB of signal strength is roughly ten times worse than losing 17dB. As I understand it, there is no other phone out there with this level of signal attenuation problem. NB: I am not a signalology expert and only vaguely understand decibels.
As other's have noted, the number of dBm being received by an antenna is not really a very interesting figure. What is much more interesting is to know what is happening to the signal to noise ratio.
Imagine someone talking to you in a load bar. That person can, by shouting at you, make themself understood - but just barely. Although the signal is high, the noise (bar music, other conversations etc) is also high, and the quality of the communication is much reduced. That same person talking in a library could use a tone just barely above a whisper, and still be more clearly understood because the noise floor is so much lower in a library.
Many people don't realise that noise is actually the limiting factor in communications - if a signal has been attenuated, we can always just amplify it back up, but amplification amplifies the noise as well as the signal. Eventually, once the signal and the noise reach roughly equal amplitudes, amplification just gives you the noisy bar situation, you can't ever get back to the quiet library...
Bringing this back to the iPhone's antenna, we same to be in the library case, rather than the bar case. The signal that is being received when the antenna is being held is much quieter than what we see in other phones, but when we look at the only metric that really counts - bandwidth - we see that the iPhone is achieving consistently high transfer speeds, even when the antenna spacing has been bridged by someone's hand.
If I had to guess, based on the anandtech data, what we are seeing is an antenna that performs extremely well at reducing noise from the environment. Alternatively, the calibration of the sensor giving the signal strength readings in the 4G might not be terribly good. Either way, the independent tests done so far have all indicated that the iPhone 4G is outperforming every other phone out there at the moment, when looking at signal throughput.