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Antenna designer writes about the iPhone 4
- tharris7 16y agoI wonder if increasing the gap between the metal antennae pieces would make any difference (i.e. the distance any signal would have to travel through your hand is increased, hence greater impedance).
- suraj 16y agoFTA - | So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements - and efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements! This is analogous to saying driving experience doesn't matter as long as car pases emission tests which is certainly not true (I hope). People don't buy phones because it passes FCC testing they buy phones to make calls! If you don't factor human hand into your design, word of mouth will kill the phone.
- fname 16y agoword of mouth will kill the phone I'm not so sure. Of all the complaints about AT&T consistently dropping calls, people are still flocking to the iPhone. I realize they don't have a choice, but once again, people are voting with their dollars. They're willing to accept a subpar network for a cool phone.
- ramy_d 16y agopeople do have choice http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph... people are voting with their dollars. The design of the product is more important than its functionality (this is to say: the average consumer likes pretty things).
- alexitosrv 16y agoBut in this case, people also must be willing to accept a not so cool iPhone a cause of the antenna issue... well, unless they want to follow that stupid solution suggested by Jobs.
- douglasputnam 16y ago"word of mouth will kill the phone" Whenever we hear a prediction about "word of mouth" stunting the sales of an Apple product, we have to take that statement with an iPhone-sized grain of salt. Word of mouth doesn't hurt recent Apple products. The Gizmodo "leaks" were word of mouth about this particular phone and Apple sold 1,000,000 phones today. If you will think back a few months, "word of mouth" was that the 27-inch iMac had screen problems. That "word of mouth" amounted to thousands of posts on the Apple support site. Apple simply fixed/replaced the machines with problems, improving their reputation as a make-good company. I haven't heard any "word of mouth" about the iMac lately because the customers are satisfied and the FUD has evaporated. When these iPhone problems are resolved, this entire thread will dry up and blow away in the wind.
- jsz0 16y agoI've been thinking about this a lot lately. There's definitely a growing disconnect between internet people and reality. It's not at all limited to technology news. I don't think it's going to end well.
- jurjenh 16y agoMost likely to immersion bias - they tend to visit sites that align with their beliefs, which in turn reinforces their world view, and without a healthy dose of physical reality, the distortion gets so bad you tend to get these types of comments a lot. It pays to be aware of the subjectiveness of your feelings on things - if I can't put objective figures on it, then I don't trust it - which tends to eliminate popular folklore from a lot of scenarios...
- mechanical_fish 16y agoa growing disconnect between internet people and reality The disconnect has always been there. People have always had immersion bias. That's why it goes by many names: Parochialism, regionalism, racism, class bias, tribalism. It's fun to watch people blame the disconnect between tribal culture and reality on the Internet -- one could have predicted that; new technology tends to get blamed for anything and everything, no matter what the technology is -- but history is replete with examples of clueless, reality-disconnected people who managed to construct their bubbles without the benefit of any kind of networking tech. Lysenko didn't need the net. The pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy didn't need the net.
- watty 16y agoYep, this piece really threw me off on the article. He may be an antenna expert but he definitely doesn't know much about product design. OF COURSE reception when being held is a design requirement. Regulation requirements must trump aesthetics and functionality but it doesn't mean Apple doesn't consider stuff like the way the phone looks and how well it works when held.
- boltofblue 16y ago"Putting this iPhone 4 in your pocket will likely couple more energy into your body (you bag of salt water, you) than did the first generation model. Yep, I predict it will be worse." I hope this isn't dangerous to your health. He is buying one, so I assume not.
- ChRoss 16y agoI have a 3GS, and every time I pick up call from desk phone (with iPhone at the desk), I will experience interference. Now, I need to put my 3GS around half meter away every time there's call to office line. I wonder if anyone experience this also.
- jarek 16y agoIt is the same kind of chatter you might be able to hear in speakers when the phone is nearby? That's a standard GSM thing -- GSM uses specific RF frequencies which induce the noise. ("GSM chatter" is a reasonably common name for this.)
- nitrogen 16y agoThis is one of the reasons I prefer CDMA. It is really, really annoying to be in a public address setting (i.e. a church, auditorium, stadium) and hear peoples' phones in the sound system. Yes, it is a sign of a miswired installation, but in my experience it only happens with GSM phones.
- jonny_noog 16y agoI have a 3GS and I find that I need to place it about a metre from my computer's speakers to avoid audible interference. All my previous phones have done this as well (last before the 3GS was a Sony Ericsson w800i), but they didn't need to be placed as far away from the speakers before the interference could no longer he heard.
- X-Istence 16y agoGet some speakers that are properly shielded and have ferrite beads on the speaker connection. My JBL Pro speakers never have interference from my iPhone.
- neonfunk 16y agoIt's a somewhat reasonable account (notably by an iPhone owner), though I remain skeptical (i.e., not trusting either side). I've had an iPhone 4 for two days now, and I have yet to be able to reproduce the problem; I even tried licking my finger and wrapping it around the bottom left corner, making sure to connect both antennas. I couldn't get it to drop even one bar. This is not at all to say that it's not a real issue, but the sensationalism belies how little we know about it so far. Of course, people are going to delight in exploiting any chink in Apple's armor, especially today.
- pkulak 16y agoI wouldn't trust the "bars" to indicate anything.
- neonfunk 16y agoExactly why I'm skeptical about these reports, including my own! (And if the old method to access the field test mode hadn't been disabled, I'd be the first to give you dBm measurements.)
- jarek 16y agoThis. If we are going to have a discussion about this, I really, really hope to at least see some dBm numbers. From a test right now, picking up my Blackberry 8100 (antenna along the bottom) in roughly the manner I would use to hold it to my ear, I lose about 10 to 15 dBm (from around -66 to -69 to around -79 to -81), which means the received signal power drops by around 10 to 30 times. I don't know if that's particularly good or bad; I've never had problems with dropped calls.
- jboydyhacker 16y agoMy bet is once the author actually can get a physical handset in his hands he might change his view somewhat. I don't think the author is aware of the extent of signal loss. While Apple's statement is true that any handset will experience signal loss from being held tightly, the loss with some IPhone 4s is almost total loss. The comment by Jobs "just don't hold it that way" is probably going to tick a bunch of folks off. I still love the phone tho.
- vault_ 16y agoI've gotta say, this was both informative and amusing to read. I wish I got to read articles like this more often.
- doron 16y agoA comment at techcrunch is priceless "It's not a design flaw. Steve is just trying to bring gentility and good manners to mobile phone usage. The correct way to hold an iPhone 4 is with the thumb and index finger on either side of the phone, while extending the pinky outward as if holding a fine china cup (the pinky will also act as a supplemental antenna). Once the user is holding the phone like a Regency dandy, he will naturally tend to behave like one, showing the world what a well-mannered chap he is. Pure genius. "
- wisdomoflife 16y agoiPhone 4G,Next Generation Apple iPhone after 3G http://iphone4g2.tk/ http://iphone4g2.tk/
- davi 16y agoThis is one of those articles that makes me love the web. In the midst of a wave of angst about iPhone4 reception, we get a high S/N article, bubbled up from a vast froth of noise on the topic. It's like HN is my antenna for the internet.
- philwelch 16y agoYeah, but if you open another tab for Reddit in Safari and have your mouse pointer overlapping both tabs, your bandwidth goes down.
- jodrellblank 16y agoOr another genuine issue which I had today - if you install Safari 5 it will cause your Netgear DGN2000 router to crash and need rebooting every time you open a big page. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2454916&tstart=0 http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2454916...
- napierzaza 16y agoReally? I feel nauseous when I have a Reddit window open. Is that why?
- cpr 16y agoThis article by the same fellow is great stuff: http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/5/30/30-db-in-30-minutes.html http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/5/30/30-db-in... .
- wallflower 16y agoIf you enjoy Sherlock Holmes-type problem solving and forensic engineering, check out the user-contributed Sherlock Ohms series on Design News. "Famous investigations into the most diabolical real-world cases in engineering." http://www.designnews.com/blog/Sherlock_Ohms/index.php http://www.designnews.com/blog/Sherlock_Ohms/index.php
- defdac 16y agoI've always wondered about the design flaw of keeping the buttons on the phone below the screen, making it next to impossible to hold the phone with one hand and use the thumb to press the buttons. If you flipped it upside down it was easy to use the thumb though. (actually I still have a button phone, but I figure that everyone reading this thread will have a more modern type of phone..)
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoYou mean the volume buttons? Just be left handed and all is well.
- lutorm 16y agoThis is a perfect example of the effects of "optimization by proxy" that was discussed in the lesswrong article posted here yesterday. The examples are really countless, auto crash tests and insurance safety ratings is a pretty good one, whereby "safety" has come to mean "safety to the occupants without any consideration of the risks to others".
- Robin_Message 16y agoActually, the European crash safety tester does include pedestrian safety in its ratings: http://www.euroncap.com/Content-Web-Page/6019e175-a493-4cce-bb94-df5bee4656bb/pedestrian-protection.aspx http://www.euroncap.com/Content-Web-Page/6019e175-a493-4cce-...
- ajg1977 16y ago"And sometimes an antenna that's not great, but good enough, is good enough." Clearly his carrier isn't AT&T.
- mikeklaas 16y agoNormally funny, I suppose, if a bit tired. But this man designs antennae for use on AT&T's network