NEWS: Verizon and AT&T May Both Get Apple Tablet

Apple's iPad can shut down if it gets too hot, and Jacob Baltazar, Claudia Keller, and John Browning are as mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore.

Those unhappy iPadders have filed suit against Apple ? and they're asking the court to elevate their claim to class-action status.

Their lawsuit, filed in the US District Court, Northern District of California, alleges that "the iPad overheats so quickly under common weather conditions that it does not function for prolonged use either outdoors, or in many other warm conditions."

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Or not. As MacDailyNews reminds us, the iPad's "Important Product Information Guide" advises, with tradition Cupertinian disregard for both definite and indefinite articles: "Operate iPad in a place where the temperature is between 0° and 35° C (32° to 95° F). Low- or high-temperature conditions might temporarily shorten battery life or cause iPad to temporarily stop working properly."

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COMMENT: Shades of the fanless Mac.

So what's the problem? Makes a great coffee cup warmer.

It turns out Steve Jobs wasn't exaggerating all that much when he said it can take three years to get a cell tower approved in San Francisco.

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A seemingly exasperated Jobs addressed the problem in a July 16 press conference. "When AT&T wants to add a cell tower in, oh, Texas or somewhere, it takes three weeks to get approval in a typical community. To get a cell phone tower in San Francisco, it takes something like three years," he said at the press event to discuss the iPhone 4's antenna issues two weeks ago.

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City records for the past few years show that applications to build new wireless telecommunication stations (the city's term for cell sites) can take a few months or up to a two years or longer before a final action, such as approval to build a new panel antenna is handed down by city officials.

And this drawn-out process is well-known in the industry. "San Francisco has one of the most complicated, burdensome, arcane processes in the country, without question," said Patrick Ryan, adjunct professor of telecommunications policy at University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Panel antennas--which measure about one foot by four feet and about 8 or

9 inches thick--are the only practical option wireless carriers have to bulk up their coverage in the city and county of San Francisco. The city does not allow cell towers to be built because the local government considers them an eyesore. So the best option for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and others is to build panel antennas onto existing structures--the penthouse of a tall building, the steeple of a church, a utility pole--typically in clumps of three to 12.

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Sometimes carriers will remove their application on their own when they run into too much community opposition, or when the process drags on and drags up the cost, planner Ionin said.

A recent example is T-Mobile's attempt to put a new antenna on the steeple of a church in the Mission District to fix what the carrier termed "an identifiable gap in coverage." But after just a few months of applying for the city permit, T-Mobile yanked its application in June because of fierce opposition from the church's neighbors. According to a letter from the carrier to the planning commission, T-Mobile did so in order "to promote harmonious relations and engender community goodwill."

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Last year, the FCC approved a "shot clock", which specifies a "reasonable" time limit on such procedures. The problem is that San Francisco and other cities are using the hearing process to delay almost indefinitely the installation of new towers.

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

Precisely why FCC needs to expand PRB-1 to INCLUDE all communications services it licenses, not just ham radio.....

FCC can stop this nonsense, immediately, if it wants. I don't think the sellphone carriers WANT it stopped, or it would have already been done. I think the sellphone carriers are looking for a SCAPEGOAT to blame their lack of system expansion to fill in the holes in their coverage in less- than-stellar-profitable areas under their license. FCC can stop all that, too! It's called "Proof of Performance" and any broadcast engineer can tell you how expensive THAT can get if his boss tries to turn down the power to save the company a few bucks in light bill on the big transmitter.

FCC can put a stop to BOTH these problems, as soon as the bribery prosecutions of government officials who've been sucking at the tit of the CTIA for all these years get hung.

With all due respect, I was once involved in a Bernal Heights neighborhood association, and it was amazing how many carriers wanted to put up cell towers, and in how many locations. It seems that at every meeting there was yet another carrier wanting to put up antennda.

Yeah, I know that it's nice to have good cell coverage, but the antennas are unsightly. Especially in a city such as SF where people are proud of the architecture and the views, hanging antennas on the sides of buildings makes them really really ugly.

Antennas are ugly, especially those 40 meter rotating monstrosities. Also, I think the service hams provide during disasters is very overrated. When you live among other people you have to get along with other people. This means complying with local regulations designed to improve the aesthetics of a neighborhood.

Signs of a low-class neighborhood include cars parked in front yards and huge ham antennas. I'm thinking San Leandro just off Davis Street, and most neighborhoods in Concord and Pittsburg.

If hams truly want to serve the public that they're always talking about serving, then they should erect disguised antennas or at least those that are somewhat pleasing to look at.

I'm speaking as a former ham, though I haven't been active since high school.

It is *right* that the FCC should take away some ham bands. Ham radio is experimental radio. There isn't much to experiment with any longer, and the remaining bands provide plenty of space for experimentation. Most hams don't experiment at all. They buy lots of equipment and work QSO's halfway around the world to talk about their rigs. They collect wallpaper. They don't provide much of a community service, except in those very rare instances of disasters, and then I don't see that they do that much that can't otherwise be done by local disaster folks using conventional VHF and UHF 2-way.

Wires for the trolley buses are probably the most ugly fixture of a big city that one can see, IMHO. I'll bet no one said a word when that system went up all over town. And thats not to mention the interference to radio and television reception they create.

Quite honestly, I would think good phone service would trump crappy bus service (and don't get started with me about that: I use the Muni all the time.) Wish I could use my cell phone in the city!

Everybody wants to go to heaven, nobody wants to die.

It reminds me of the windmill "debates" around here. No one wants coal (dirty dirty), no one wants nuclear (boom bang), there _are_ no waterfalls, and now no one wants wind power either (bad for the birds and probably cause cancer).

So what now? We turn off all the lights and move into raw food vegan yurts and hope for the best?

So in summary, you don't want hams to have the spectrum, but you also don't want commercial guys put up antennas in your neighbourhood so that they can use it.

If you'd now complain about how crappy your cell phone works you could score a perfect trifecta.

Dennis Ferguson

I was at a meeting where T-Mobile was given approval for a rooftop antenna with the only caveat being that they had to shield the equipment (not the tower) from view from the nearby neighborhood. They refused.

The early carriers (who eventually morphed into Verizon and AT&T) have the advantage of having been able to install lots of towers before neighborhoods realized what was happening, in addition to the advantage of being on 800 MHz not 1900 MHz.

AT&T's problems in the San Francisco Bay Area are partially due to the fact that the network they purchased from Cellular One was not as developed as the network that GTE Mobilnet had deployed in the early years. Verizon is reaping the benefits now, and the same situation occurred in other areas as well. It was a one time advantage that GTE exploited fully. Maybe they had management that realized what was going to eventually happen in terms of restrictions on towers.

[alt.cellular.cingular removed. Cingular no longer exists]

I worked on the Microsoft Tablet reference design and the Compaq TC1000 tablet. The thermal engineering was very difficult, much more so than a laptop. It has to work in both orientations, it has to be cool enough to hold comfortably, and it has to be quiet. The initial goal was not to have a fan, but there was no way to cool it under all possible circumstances without the occasional use of a fan, unless we lowered the processor speed to a level where the performance was severely impacted. It was a much thicker tablet with more vent holes than the iPad. When I saw the iPad I was impressed that they had been able to design it as they had and still been able to deal with all the thermal issues.

There are software workarounds for thermal issues. You run the processor slower as the temperature goes up. It's not ideal, but it will work. Probably the thermal profiles need to be tuned to prevent these shutdowns.

What's strange about the lawsuit is that over-temp shutdowns should be independent of the weather conditions, they should depend solely on the temperature readings from the core and other temp sensors in the unit, and a shutdown should only occur when other measures to lower the temperature have failed.

[alt.cellular.cingular removed, Cingular no longer exists]

Or when the coffee cup and its aromatic payload are at just the right temp.

Amen!

Amen on this too!

Speaking for myself, what I want is for less precious spectrum to be dedicated to the personal hobbies of hams, and for reasonably attractive siting of commercial radio towers. Left entirely to their own devices, commercial radio operators will put up the cheapest ugly crap they can, so it's up to government to strike an appropriate balance with reasonable rules. And this is a kinda sorta democracy, if the majority would rather have less towers and poorer wireless coverage, then that's what they should be able to get -- there's no right of the few to impose their will on the many in this regard, and it's up to carriers to sell the public on the benefits of the towers.

This is a kinda sorta democracy, so if the majority would rather have less towers and poorer wireless coverage, then that's what they should be able to get -- there's no right of the few to impose their will on the many in this regard. There's no compelling public interest in good cellular coverage. It's up to cellular carriers (and hams) to sell the public on the benefits of their towers.

Switch carriers. My T-Mobile phone works everywhere I've tried it.

There is no such advantage, as the citations I've posted make clear.

How can it be independent of weather (or, at least, the ambient temperature around the device)? The internal heat has to go somewhere, and it can be drawn out of the device into a 70-degree F environment much faster than into, say, a 90-degree one.