"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. "
This 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.
Or 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.
It'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.
Make sure to test in a place where you have lost at least one or two bars before you test. Otherwise the reception is probably saturated and your hand can not make a difference.
This. 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.
An app that instructs the user to pick up the phone and hold it to his head as he would while talking, records the RSSI over a course of a couple of minutes, then graphs or displays the results might be an interesting weekend project.
You can do it if you've jailbroken. Haven't looked for non-jailbroken stuff.
On my 3GS, I can vary up to 20 dBm depending on how I'm holding it, how I rotate myself and/or the phone, where I'm holding it in relation to my body, etc.
Regardless of the actual numbers, the issue doesn't appear when the gap in the antenna is taped over or it is otherwise insulated (like with a bumper).
That strongly suggests to me that this is something over and above normal loss of signal caused by picking up in a hand.
Sure -- but I've also seen reports that the effect is much more pronounced in areas of spotty coverage (as measured by bars). Perhaps, even though over and above, the degradation is still acceptable with areas of good coverage.
Unless every human being can reproduce the issue with precision, it is a non-issue and neonfunk will be skeptical.
Sir, We are not talking about newton's third law here. There could very well defective units or other factors come into play. So don't assume others are just lying liers
| 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.
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.
I'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.
a 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.
Most 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...
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.
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).
By choices, I'm referring to the network. Most consumers (not ones who jailbreak, mind you...) don't have a choice. If they want the iPhone, they're stuck with ATT.
But 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.
Yep, 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.
My 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.
This 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".
I 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).
I'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..)
"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."
"While certain media outlets continue to claim that regular cell phone use is unlikely to cause brain cancer, you should know that Interphone found "heavy users" of cell phones were found to have an approximately doubled risk of glioma, a life threatening and often-fatal brain tumor, after 10 years of cell phone use.
What was the definition of a heavy user?
About two hours … a month!
When this study was conducted (1999-2004), cell phone use had not yet exploded to the extent it has today. Now, the results are clearly outdated, because in the decade that's passed since the study was begun, cell phone use has grown exponentially and it is not at all unusual for people to use a cell phone for two hours or more a day!
What this means is that if you use your cell phone for two hours a month or more, you may be doubling your risk of a potentially fatal brain tumor. Use your cell phone significantly more than that, and your risk is likely much, much higher."
None of the studies I've ever seen on this have proposed a mechanism by which radiation from a cellular phone causes cancer, which seems to be a bit of a hurdle given that some novel mechanism would be necessary (as far as I'm aware, the radiation emitted by a cell phone is well below -- orders of magnitude below -- the necessary level of energy to break chemical bonds, which is, well, sort of a prerequisite for radiation to cause cancer).
You appear to have your facts wrong. From the study[1]:
> Eligible cases were all patients with a glioma or meningioma of the brain diagnosed in the study regions during study periods of 2–4 years between 2000 and 2004.
So participants in the study lasted between 2 and 4 years. Since elevated rates of cancer were only found in the group with the highest usage[2], this means people with >=1640 hours of talk time, which means between 68 and 34 hours per month.
Not two hours per month. And this is easy to sanity check; here's the study again:
> Corresponding values for [median lifetime cumulative call time] glioma controls were 100 h lifetime, 2.5 h/month and about 2000 calls.
So the median user used about 2.5 hours per month, not the heavy user.
Now, let's hear them out a bit more:
> Overall, no increase in risk of glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels, but biases and error prevent a causal interpretation. The possible effects of long-term
heavy use of mobile phones require further investigation.
It's also worth noting that you're using the word double somewhat duplicitously. Yes, the study found double the glioma rate in very heavy users (as discussed, much more than two hours per month), but it also found that the rest of cellphone users are less likely to get cancer than average.
If we take your causal analysis seriously, then we should also take this seriously: low to moderate cell phone usage grants instant partial immunity to brain cancer.
So, because the cancer rate in the study population excluding the highest usage group was .7 of what it is in the normal population, a rate of 1.4 times the normal population among heavy users is double the rate seen in the rest of the study population.
edited to add: Upon reflection, my analysis of the talk time is slightly wrong. The study means >=1640 hours lifetime cell phone usage. You can still use your cellphone 2.5 hours per month for 54 years before you reach this threshold.
I don't know about this particular study, but many of these cell phone radiation studies are statistically flawed in that they start with cancer patients and then ask them about cell phone use. If you do that, you are almost guaranteed to find something if you ask enough questions.
It is important to compare the amount of radiation here though... I'm pretty sure new phones are a bit more efficient with their signals, battery life has increased phenomenally and this must be partly due to lower power usage. Although with phones like the iPhone, you've got several types of wireless going at the same time...
Anyone got recent, non-biased studies on the same?
As you seem to be well informed about the topic: Do you know if it is usual for cellphone designers to use the optional headset/headphone combination as an extended antenna and if so if it is still better to prefer it to a bluetooth based solution? I think this is something a lot of people would like to know as heavy cellphone use ia often unavoidable these days.
Almost all phone manufacturers use headset cable as FM antenna. On the other hand there is almost no way how it could be used as antenna for anything other than FM. (antennas for GSM/GPS/WiFi/whatever bands are carefully designed devices with tight tolerances and not pieces of wire of some approximate length)
Purely anecdotal but when on site at Nokia and Sony Ericsson >5 years ago it seemed that nearly everyone used the wired headset so I started too. More recently I don't see that as much.
So, is it the case that the existing risk was negligible, or would you conclude from the explosion in cellphone use in the interim (without a corresponding vast increase in such tumors) that the study was wrong?
I 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.
It 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.)
This 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.
I 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.
It's probably time I upgrade my speakers, I've had them for some time now. It's a Klipsch 2.1 set from about 3 years ago. I was under the impression that Klipsch was a reasonably good quality brand, but I guess they're missing these ferrite beads you speak of. Something to keep in mind for when I do upgrade, thanks.
That's interesting. It suggests that your iphone is typically on a 2G GSM network, rather than a 3G UMTS/HSPA network. GSM is known for causing audio interference because the TDMA transmission window cycles at about 200Hz.
Does your 3GS say '3G' on the status bar while it's interfering with your speakers?
Usually at home, I see the little wifi symbol as it's hooking on to my router, but if I turn off wifi, your suspicion appears to be correct, I can see that it's on 2G at home. So yeah, that probably has a lot to do with the issue, thanks for the info. My carrier doesn't have the greatest 3G coverage in all areas, but they're currently IMO, the best of a not so great bunch of options in my country.
Was your Dopod GSM, UMTS, or CDMA? UMTS and CDMA phones won't do generate audio-domain interference. Any 2G GSM phone, from the most expertly-designed Nokia or Ericsson to the worst Huawei will interfere with your speakers.
Why would the iPhone be any different to any other phone, in that regards. They all emit radio waves, the iPhone doesn't emit any stronger than any other phone, by much anyway.
The radio on the phone uses the least power it can while still maintaining a good connection to the tower. A faulty antenna will make the radio increase its transmission power.
This is my major concern about the iPhone 4 and why I have planned to skip it: since when is holding a phone by its antenna a good thing? I'd like reassurance there is no health danger, especially after reading this:
"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. "