Let the games begin!

big deal. people sue for all sorts of reasons. sometimes they're valid, sometimes they're not.

google is in trouble for wifi data breaches, violating patents and privacy policies, but you don't hear much about that do you.

Yes.

nospam wrote on [Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:04:47 -0700]:

Are you kidding? It was all over the tech news a month ago.

nowhere near as much as the iphone antenna issue. four lawsuits already and the phone has been out a week.

meanwhile, google tracks every search you do and indexes your email (if you use gmail) for ad targeting. not much fuss over that.

nospam wrote on [Fri, 02 Jul 2010 22:21:54 -0700]:

Germany, Ireland and a few other countries I can't remember off the top of my head sued google over the wifi data mining.

Google tells you up front what they do with your data

Justin wrote in news:i0nbhl$pcn$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal- september.org:

Precisely my point about the horrors of cloud computing.....

Larry wrote on [Sat, 03 Jul 2010 14:27:22 +0000]:

yep, however this point had nothing to do with the cloud

At first, Apple said this was a problem common to any phone and suggested buying a rubber case or holding the phone differently. Translation: Apple doesn't have a clue about RF and is now in damage control mode. Blaming the victim is a great start.

To fix this, we are adopting AT&T?s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone?s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see. Translation: AT&T recommends playing with the cosmetic bar graph.

Apple has gone a step further and tuned the phone to utilize whichever network band is less congested or has the least interference for the best signal quality, regardless of the actual signal strength. Early reports suggest this feature, while buggy in its early stages, will greatly improve the phone's reliability on AT&T's fragile network. Translation: Apple uses the SNR (signal quality) and not the signal strength (-dBM) to control the phone.

Recalculating the bars does not control xmit power or initiate a disconnect. That's done by the calculated SNR or BER (bit error rate) which should be visible if the internal diagnostics works on the iPhone 4 as it does on the 3G.

Playing with the RSSI to bars conversion is just a smoke screen. More likely, there are considerably more changes included.

However, I don't think that's the problem. My guess(tm) is that the antenna Q is too high. My ancient LG VX8100 phone has an external antenna. I can grab the antenna, wrap my hand around it, and the signal drops maybe one bar. Running a fast test in field test mode, normal -79dBm 4 bars hand on antenna -89dBm 3 bars

-10dB is a large drop, but not 2 bars or enough to cause a disconnect. That's because the 30mm long antenna is fairly low Q, broadband, and seperated from direct contact by about 2mm of plastic.

From various reports, the iPhone 4 drops more like 3-4 bars when the antenna tip is touched. If that's true (I haven't played with an iPhone 4 yet), that's a -30dB or more drop, which is far too sensitive to survive hand contact.

My very unofficial conversion table from -dBm to bars: Bars -dBm 1 -102 to -112 2 -94 to -101 3 -87 to -93 4 -77 to -86 5 -38 to -76 tested on my VX8100.

More, borrowed from one of my previous rants on the subject:

Deja Vu. When the Motorola RAZR antenna landed on the bottom of the phone, instead of the top, there was considerable debate about how to handle the problem of how to hold the phone. I'll spare you the arguments and details, but it was decided to do nothing. Eventually, through trial and error, the customers were expected to understand how it works and optimize how they hold the phone. Most did, but a few had to be told by the dealer what was happening.

However, the RAZR was different because covering the antenna area reduced the signal levels, but didn't shut down the phone. With the iPhone 4, there appears to be a much more drastic reduction in signal level. My guess(tm) is either the PA might be shutting down from excessive VSWR, or the antenna Q is so high, that touching it near the tip has a drastic effect on the tuning. It looks about the right size for a PIFA antenna at 800 MHz, but I'm not sure. Touching the end of the PIFA antenna is a bad idea. Apple could have reduced the effect by burying the last inch or more of the antenna under some cosmetic plastic, but apparently decided that styling is more important than function.

Note that projecting external antennas have been on cell phones since the stone age. Internal antenna are a recent development. Touching the antenna on an old external antenna cell phone had little effect, so it's there's no reason an external antenna shouldn't work on the iPhone 4. Something else is going on, but without an iPhone 4 to play with, I'm guessing.

Who is responsible for the integrity and security of data stored "in the cloud"? Why should I, or anyone, be willing to entrust his data to it?

That's why I encrypt the data I sent to my cloud backup service. My email already travels unencrypted across less trustworthy servers than google between the end user hitting send and me receiving it. I trust comcast a whole bunch less than google. AT&T even less than Comcast, yet how many people use one of those as their ISP?

The cloud is not a single entity, it's Amazon, it's Google, it's Microsoft, it's facebook, it's Yahoo, etc. You need to pick who you want to trust and for what service. It's no different than trusting your doctor with your medical records. Or perhaps which pharmacy you trust when you fill your prescription.

The Sharpie solution might work for them as well, "

"

Thanks!

I think I will continue to backup my phone to my computer. I also have very similar data on my PDA if I should happen to need it. If all three sources are somehow destroyed I probably won't be in any condition to care!

That's a nice theory, but if you are at the grocery store during a storm and your house is blown away with your computer, and you get caught in a heavy downpour and your phone gets wet and stops working, you can still be in pretty good condition and have lost it all.

other companies do it too.

nokia dictates how to hold their phones:

here's another:

there are plenty of others.

some other phones also use snr. there was an issue way way back with sprint where people would complain that one phone showed the maximum number of bars and another sitting right next to it had 1-2 bars. the reason that one showed snr and the other showed strength.

i don't remember which phones those were, but i do remember the nokia

6185 having horrible reception compared to just about every other sprint cellphone at the time. no lawsuits for that one though. :)

according to anandtech tests, it's: -113, -107, -103, -101, -91, -51

it also says:

I can honestly say that I've never held onto so many calls and data simultaneously on 1 bar at -113 dBm as I have with the iPhone 4, so it's readily apparent that the new baseband hardware is much more sensitive compared to what was in the 3GS. The difference is that reception is massively better on the iPhone 4 in actual use.

holding the pull-out antenna has an effect on my old cellphone, and the instructions that came with it say not to do that.

I think I can take that risk!

That makes sense! Any antenna intended for use by a transmitter must be carefully matched to the transmitter. If carefully done, most of the transmitter's signal is radiated which is what you want. Modifying the antenna, e.g. by adding part of your body, can result in an impedance mismatch which can cause the signal to be reflected back into the transmitter rather than being radiated, which, being translated, means that your call may not go through or you may get very poor reception or both.

I think that most modern cell phones use only an internal antenna. Some of the older phones had a telescoping antenna a whole three or four inches long.

I like that meter. My HTC-built Sony X1 (great PDA, terrible phone) switches from 5 bars to 4 at -90 dbm. That's a meter designed to "hide" a lousy phone! Consequently, I get very little warning before losing signal entirely. The bars drop from 5 to 0 rather quickly in weak areas.

they're deceiving you. time for a lawsuit. :)

Strange why people are just complaining about the new phone, my 3GS has always dropped signal strength remarkably if I hold it with my hand around the top half/

The difference is that it will go from 3bars to no bars depending on how I hold it, and that is with a case on it

David