iPhone (NOT the 4)
This story in the Daily Mirror today made me smile.
It started a few days ago with this report on the BBC, where anoraks who had queued to get the new iPhone the day before were finding that the signal strength dropped when they held it. The BBC story points out that the iPhone’s case is made of stainless steel, which also acts as the antenna, so you can immediately see a possible connection between physical contact with it and signal strength. The same story also mentions that Steve Jobs referred to this antenna as “really cool engineering ” when he announced the iPhone 4.
Better still, in a follow-up story the next day, Jobs’ official response to the fact that if you hold it in the lower left corner where the antenna is centered you lose signal was:
Just avoid holding it in that way.
This is classic – it reminds me of when I was a kid and my mum went to the doctors with a bad back. She raised her arms and said to the doctor “it hurts when I do this”. He replied: “Well, don’t do it then”.
The official Apple stance (i.e. minus Jobs’ expert people skills) is:
…to “avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band”.
Alternatively, said Apple, customers could buy a case to shield the antenna.
So! The Mighty Apple has screwed up, eh? But now look at that latest story in The Mirror. Apple is trying to claim that the problem is merely down to a faulty algorithm for calculating how many bars to show.
Apple says the problem relates to an error on how the signal bars are displayed, rather than the signal.
This is in spite of the fact that the physical act of holding it in the lower left corner appears to affect the algorithm as well! Apple rambles some more:
“We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising,” the statement read.
“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.
“Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays two more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display four bars when we should be displaying as few as two bars.
“Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying four or five bars.
“Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.”
And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything – and you also probably bought an iPhone. However, many experts believe there is a deeper problem.
I would not use anything by Apple – even if you paid me. Macs are for people who can’t use a real computer, just like AOL is for people who don’t know what proper internet access is. And the iPad is like a catwalk model: great to look at, but pretty dim inside.
My Orange contract is up for renewal in August and I want a new phone to replace my HTC Touch HD. The HTC Desire is the one for me.
Incidentally, while I was looking for an iPhone photo to use in this post, I found this blog post (look, I wanted an iPhone pic quickly and this was the first one that came up – I don’t actually read stuff like this). Seems like Apple screws up more than it’s followers like to admit.
EDIT 20/07/2010: Jobs admitted this week that the iPhone is flawed, after all. Just goes to show how pointless it is fabricating a complex web of lies when the facts are staring everyone in the face. Apple if offering a free cover/reception booster to try and make amends.