The Philippine Online Chronicles

The Web is buzzing once more with iPhone 4 antenna issues.  MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann talked about it in depth.  David Letterman is talking about Top 10 signs you’ve purchased a bad iPhone 4.  Even the Financial Times is in on it, reporting a drop in Apple share price.

Engadget said that Consumer Reports confirms iPhone 4 problems--- and so do they.  Engadget’s wizards played around with apps to help determine what's wrong with iPhone 4.  They asked the help of Erica Sadun from the Unofficial Apple Weblog.  Erica wrote the app and demoed that the infamous iPhone 4 death grip is very freighting real.

The Wall Street Journal on the other hand is reporting that Apple indeed knew about the risk, but went on with the launch anyway.  WSJ further added that Apple will not recall phones.

What about conflicting reports that say, iPhone 4 works fine for them?

Some users have no problem

Engadget wrote about “yes, iPhone 4 is broken/no, iPhone 4 is broken,” highlighting that not all users have problems with iPhone 4.

On the other hand, (no pun intended) Ed Dale from Down Under (Australia) had no trouble at all with his iPhone 4 running on Telstra Next G network.  Ed wrote:

Here’s the thing, out the front of my home there is a vortex of Next G misery – every time I pull my car in front of my house for the past five years, Blackberry, Nokia, First three iPhones – the call was cut mercilessly. You could set your watch by it. Regardless of phone, on the best network in the world, my call dropped.

Enter the iPhone 4.

For the first time in four years, the call kept going!!!

Henry McCracken over at the Technologizer wrote about his iPhone 4 death grip experience and said that to him it seem that the conventional wisdom is holding true, of which, AnandTech wrote about it in their iPhone 4 review:

“…anything conductive which bridges the gap in the bottom left couples the antennas together, detuning the precisely engineered antennas. It's a problem of impedance matching with the body as an antenna, and the additional antenna that becomes part of the equation when you touch the bottom left.”

That’s not to say that iPhone 4’s antenna is a case terrible engineering.  No, in fact, if you go read AnandTech’s previous paragraph they wrote that iPhone 4’s external antenna promised to improve reception over iPhone 3GS.  The problem though, according to Anandtech is that there should have been insulating coating atop the antenna or maybe Apple could have used “diamond vapor deposition to insulate the stainless steal.”

Consumer Report

A lab test was conducted to prove “Why Consumer Reports can’t recommend iPhone 4.” Yet it rated the best phone on their smart phones ratings:

The signal problem is the reason that we did not cite the iPhone 4 as a "recommended" model, even though its score in our other tests placed it atop the latest Ratings of smart phones that were released today.

The iPhone scored high, in part because it sports the sharpest display and best video camera we've seen on any phone, and even outshines its high-scoring predecessors with improved battery life and such new features as a front-facing camera for video chats and a built-in gyroscope that turns the phone into a super-responsive game controller. But Apple needs to come up with a permanent—and free—fix for the antenna problem before we can recommend the iPhone 4.

So iPhone 4 is the best phone out there, and yet there is this issue about making a call, so people can’t recommend them.  Sweet irony.

The fix, phase 1

Macrumors wrote “Apple released iOS 4.0.1 (8A306) for iPhone 4, 3GS and 3G.”  This piece of software changes the formula on how to determine how many bars of signal strength to display.

This latest software update from Apple also includes one for iOS 3.2.1 for iPad.  As readers might remember there have been WiFi connectivity issues with iPad users.  This update for iPad also includes the ability to search Bing via Safari’s search field.

The fix, phase 2

Yesterday, we wrote that Apple announced a special event to discuss iPhone 4.  TechCruch’s MG Siegler wrote down his thoughts saying that putting key tech journalists in one room and going over this peculiar problem once and for all is going to end it.  Nip it in the bud, so to speak.

John Gruber on the other hand has a hunch that this is going to be something beyond the antenna issue and that Apple doesn’t just call these things and have Steve Jobs walk us through the fix.

The fix, updated

According to the New York Times, no recall would take place.  Further, their source revealed that Jobs didn't know about the issue until after the product shipped.  In the same report they pointed out that the signal issues presented by the phone could be fixed by a software update.  The article also quoted a source familiar with the phone's design that:

"...iPhone 4 exposed a longstanding weakness in the basic communications software inside Apple’s phones and that the reception problems were not caused by an isolated hardware flaw."

Summary

What we know is that first, there is indeed a “problem of impedance matching with the phone’s body,” as Anandtech first reported and later confirmed by Consumer Reports, i.e. the infamous ‘death grip.’  Second, the real-world effect and its severity vary from user to user and location to location.  Third, ironically in spite of all these issues, iPhone is still the best phone in the market with its gorgeous display, its camera, the overall build quality and oh, FaceTime works on WiFi.

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iPhone 4 image, Courtesy Apple