To alleviate iPhone 4 antenna problems, Apple will give free bumper cases to everyone who bought or will buy the phone through September 30. For people who already bought a bumper case, Apple will refund the cost. Users who are still unsatisfied can return the phone, with or without a case, for a full refund within 30 days. Apple CEO Steve Jobs made the announcement at a hasily-called press conference this morning.
An online application will go live on Apple’s website next week, where iPhone 4 owners will be able to choose a free bumper case from a variety of vendors.
Jobs stressed that the iPhone 4 reception issues are common among smartphones. On the iPhone 4, occur when the phone is held over its lower left-hand corner, blocking the external antenna. Nonetheless, Jobs said, he wants to keep customers happy, hence the free cases and full refund.
If you listened to the press conference, it sounded like “take the case and quit bothering me”. If it were me, I would get a full refund, then wait till they have a fix, then buy an Android. For now you can view the news conference here.
#37 The most pathetic piece of self affirmation and defense of mac I’ve seen here. And that’s saying a lot!
But when I thought you couldn’t be more pathetic, you just go ahead and kicked it an extra notch on #38. Kudos!
#40 So you’re basically saying all other oy!Phones have been as flawed but no one noticed because macfans, being the sheep they are, kept spending more money on that stupid phone treating them as pets? I agree with you.
Know what surprises me the most about all this kerfuffle and yak?
That Jobs (and others), completely fail to identify the stingy signal strength allocated by the ISPs. As soon as the get some bandwidth, they cram and cram and cram. Contention figures (always denied but evidence contradicts this)way above that which they should be. Appalling identification of line faults where copper is used. They test the line at one time, not the time when you have the problem, and pronounce it ‘sound’. NOtice also the marketing fiddles designed to mislead, such as the old ‘up to #### bps’ where, users are always charged as if the maximum is the case, not the minimum, which is pretty nearly always the case. ALL ISPs get away with murder in the misrepresentation business (just thought of another, BIG LETTER advertising of the cost, small letter advertising of the fact that this is for three months only – if that isn’t misrepresentation, I don’t know what is).
Something like supermarkets making price tickets as small as possible, knowing full well that 85% of the population has defective eyesight. Notice how your elected representatives jump to stop you being misleaded in this way.
ok – I have a question. Since we moved from analog phones to digital phones – what the heck do the bars mean anyhow. Isn’t it 1′s and 0′s? you either have enough signal to send and receive data (1) or you don’t (0) – even at 1 bar, you can still talk – and send and receive data…. its not like you hear static when your bars drop
can someone please splain to me what bars are for?
#43 For nothing. You can waste your money on an oy!Phone
#43 Good question. I’ll try to be short and not too technical.
Analog and digital radio still have to obey the laws of physics for radio wave propagation. It is the modulation and demodulation methods that are different. Your AM/FM radio stations are examples of analog. You modulated the amplitude or frequency of the RF carrier (e.g. 740 kHz AM, 101.1 MHz FM) to “carry” the information. Demodulators reproduced the audio. In digital, voice is sampled, quantized and encoded into bits by PCM (pulse code modulation). The bits are used to alter the phase of the RF carrier to “carry” the information. Verizon and Sprint use CDMA (code division multiple access), a digital technology. CDMA uses digital codes to separate one call from the other. AMPS used frequency separation, like your AM/FM station. AT&T and T-Mobile use TDMA (time division multiple access), also a digital technology, which separate calls by time slot sampling. Never mind the details, as this is just a quick overview of analog vs digital for mobiles.
Bars are a simple graphical method to tell the user the average signal strength of the signal. It’s like the grading system in school where A may be 85-100, B is 70-85, C is 60 and 70, D is 50 to 60 and F is below 50. A to E now represent 0-100 in just 5 steps. Notice this is grading on a “curve”, where each grade is an uneven numerical range.
Think of ABCDE as bars 54321.
In reality, RF signal strength is a variable number measured logarithmically, because it spans too wide a range for linear counting. Let’s say you had a graph with the Y axis from 0-100 in steps of 10. Now if you wanted to count from 0-1,000,000 in steps of 10 you would run out of paper. Counting 0-1,000,000 in logs, you can have steps of 10 dB which are actually 10x in each step.
Now to the relevance to the five bars. Your typical phone can measure signals with a range from about -60 dBm to -110 dBm, a 50 dB range. The number -60 dBm means 1/1,000,000 of a milliwatt of RF power and -110 dBm is 100,000 times lower than that. See why it is easier to count in log units than in linear units?
Bar 5 is roughly -60 to -90 dBm
Bar 4 approx -100 to -90 dBm
Bar 3 approx -100 to -106 dBm
Bar 2 approx -106 to -110 dBm
Bar 1 approx less than -110 dBm
(Note: -60 is highest and -110 is lowest, and it is all negative because we are counting with reference to 1 milliwatt, and everything is lower)
Each manufacturer uses a different range or formula for their bars, basically a different grading curve, making it hard to do comparisons.
Obviously, counting in bars is easier than counting in dBm. But, each bar represents a range, not an absolute value. There is a display format called “field test mode” that most phones can access by dialing a special number, which changes the home screen to show engineering data, including the bar information in absolute dBm and the ID of the tower you are on, and others around you, and your frequency, etc. In this mode you can compare all phones more or less equally.
Comparing bars for different phones is like comparing the grading curves for several teachers, where some may have a more generous or tighter percentage mark to get an A-C. One teacher may insist an A is 90 and above, and another may allow 80 and above.
The general media does not understand these nuances, so we have all these outrageous headlines from usually respectable publications that completely distort and misrepresent the truth. The average user listens and reads this nonsense and is influenced to make unwise decisions.
Apple is right, all phones experience “body loss” from holding them in the hand. This number varies by design, but it is not zero. Apple made their antenna exposed to the hand grip, adding to this loss. Insulating with a case or bumper reduces this effect. A better future design would be to insulate the metal antenna periphery with a see though compound to preserve the elegant look. That’s the only shortcoming of the phone. An exposed antenna outside the case would perform better than an embedded one, as long as you don’t touch it conductively.
“I’ll try to be short and not too technical.”
Try harder.