NEWS: Apple looks for an Iphone antenna engineer

could be worse. archos has their *own* marketplace and blocks the main one.

nospam wrote in news:030720102159465361% snipped-for-privacy@nospam.invalid:

I think we'll soon find every device will have its own, proprietary, locked up, app store like Apple's. This will increase revenues and profits if they can get the sheeple to swallow it. Open source may become a dead duck if the sheeple don't rebel, as they have done many times in the past.

The new sheeple are, from the dumbed-down educational systems, much more pliable and compliant than the old farts who demanded to control the devices they bought. They'll believe anything, now....9/11, Global Warming, rising sealevels you can't measure, Al Quaeda, Zionism, Creationism, tooth fairies, almost anything. If you bang the drum loud enough and get enough sheeple banging their drums long enough, it's easy to turn total bullshit into "truth" that can be exploited against them. Just look at religious fundamentalism, as a great example.

Proprietary app stores on proprietary cloud servers.....RIM has been playing this game with Blackberries for years. It's nothing new....

Android normally won't install a non-Market app unless a setting is changed. Is your friend sure that setting has been disabled? Or does your friend not know about the setting?

I don't think that will happen with Android -- Google strongly supports the current open Android market, and has considerable clout.

1984.

By Joel Evans "The Mobile Gadgeteer? | July 4, 2010, 10:41am PDT

A couple of days ago Apple sent an open letter to iPhone 4 owners. The letter was in response to earlier reports of iPhone users having reception issues when holding the iPhone 4 the wrong way.

If you?re not familiar with the reception issues, Sam Diaz does a great job recapping the whole timeline. The crazy part about the latest round, though, is that instead of Apple admitting to a hardware flaw, the company is now saying that it has been misreporting signal strength since the original iPhone.

So, what does all of this really mean? For starters, I can?t help but think that Apple was just caught doing something slimy. I remember when I was using the first generation iPhone and had reception issues in areas where my other phones were working great. At the time, Apple was blaming AT&T but my other AT&T phones were performing perfectly in that same area where I was dropping calls. Then Apple issued an update which fixed the reception issues, or so it claimed. It seemed that I had more bars ?in more places?, but that I still didn?t have the solid coverage I should have been experiencing, given all of the bars I was seeing.

Now we?ll see an update to the iPhone (all generations) that will properly report the signal strength. The reason for the misreporting all of these years is apparently a bad formula used to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display. So, one software fix and we?ll all see the proper representation of bars. The scary part of all of this, though, is that now instead of people reporting that they saw their bars drop from 5 to 0 when holding their iPhone 4, we?ll be hearing how the phone hardly gets any bars at all.

I think the end result will be Apple and AT&T both being at fault. Apple with a design flaw, though they?ll never admit it, and AT&T with coverage issues. So, we?ll be back to the world blaming AT&T?s network, and the focus will move off of Apple once again.

I still can?t help but think that Apple pushed out an update long ago, for the original iPhone, that the company knew was misreporting the signal strength. Now that everyone is complaining, they figure they?ll adjust it to report the true representation of the signal strength, and then deal with the aftermath.

In the end the iPhone customer loses. The iPhone 4 will have to be held a certain way, and now iPhone users around the world will suddenly see just how poor their cellular signal really is.

MORE:

Changing the formula may change the number of bars displayed, but ... it doesn't explain in any way why holding it kills the signal. It's an antenna problem sure and simple, and denial will only dig them a deeper hole.

that doesn't explain why some users find it works better than with other phones.

"1) The iPhone 4 is not nearly as hypersensitive to "hand" effects as I was being led to believe from the media buzz.

2) The iPhone 4 seems to be as sensitive to hand effects as the Primordial iPhone."

Thanks, I'll ask her. Do you have a specific setting in mind or should I just Google it?

Sure it does. You can drop the signal slightly on most phones if you find and cover the antenna. The drop is usually fairly insignificant unless you're in an area with already extremely limited signal strength. In Apple's case, from this explanation, it sounds like people who are reporting a 3-4 bar drop are only seeing a drop of a few dB, but it's enough to push the signal strength meter from displaying a highly overrated signal in the first place.

Put another way, the steps to reproduce this problem usually start with finding another phone that has an accurate signal indicator and moving to an area of low signal.

It absolutely sounds like an engineering problem, but the effect of the problem is being skewed by the poor accuracy in the signal strength indicator.

Compare this to Vista's file copy issue, users screamed and yelled about how slow Vista was at copying files when it was actually faster than XP in most cases, the underlying problem was that Vista didn't look like it started copying until several seconds in, and because Vista held the user at 99%. Reflowing the status indicators to flow more smoothly solved the complaints. Perception is everything (and nowhere is this more true than Apple)

Does covering the antennas cause a signal drop? It appears the answer is "Absolutely, yes", and that's something that shouldn't have gotten out of the RF engineering lab.

However, given the fact that the iPhone 4 appears to have better sensitivity (and an all around better radio) than previous versions, users might be willing to accept a 1 bar drop when holding it certain ways, given that regardless of how they held a 3GS it would drop off sooner.

Since using a bumper helps, this is almost definitely a solvable problem (again, engineering should have caught this), either by covering the antennas with something, relocating them to a better location on the phone, or adding a second antenna and allowing the radio to use either depending on which has a better signal since it's unlikely most users could accidentally cover both the bottom corner of the phone and somewhere along the top in a natural (comfortable) grip.

Is there a problem? Absolutely. But is it the show stopper that some media outlets might have you believe? I'm betting not.

All of the above having been said, I was already planning on waiting until the official iPhone 4 release on my mobile provider before buying, and at this point I'm holding off until this issue is resolved before even considering ordering one.

"Elmo P. Shagnasty" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@62-183-169-81.bb.dnainternet.fi:

Orwell only had the date wrong.....

nospam wrote in news:040720102019555057% snipped-for-privacy@nospam.invalid:

....but the Koolaid does....

poldy wrote in news:poldy-DDFF3D.20480404072010 @news.eternal-september.org:

In the ATTWS main store in North Charleston, SC, about 1/2 mile from the

3G tower, I saw no signal drop in the demo iphone when I wrapped my hand around it.......

......UNTIL I gave it something to do, booted Safari, clicked up Youtube and played any video. Then, with my hand wrapped around it with the salesman who told me they'd never seen this problem, the bars went south....5...4....3....2...1....Youtube locked and we finally got the no signal message. I let go of the left hand and held it by the top edge, the bars instantly reappeared, the phone reconnected to ATTWS and youtube started reloading AFTER I clicked it up again, probably because we had a different IP address on the 3G server.

I told him, "There, now you don't have to go around telling everyone you've never seen the issue in the store, any more.".....

DevilsPGD wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

"This changes everything!....."

Menu > Settings > Applications > Unknown sources

Thanks, I'll pass it along!

From the user guide for my device:

To allow installing applications from the web or email

By default, your phone is configured to prevent you from installing applications you download from the web or receive in an email.

Warning! Applications downloaded from the web can be from unknown sources. To protect your phone and personal data, download applications only from trusted sources such as Android Market.

1 Press HOME > MENU, and then touch Settings > Applications. 2 Check Unknown sources. 3 Touch OK in the confirmation dialog.

And the Waffle House Syrup as well, Lar?