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a few ip4 questions from a newb

M

mweiland

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 4, 2010
8
0
new hope, pa
i'm thinking of switching to att and picking up an iphone4 and i have a few questions for anyone that owns one and has a few minutes to spare.

the antenna issue. i know a guy in my area that owns one and heard a lot of bad things from him about dropped calls. he let me check his out and i was able to cause a serious signal drop by touching the spot where you can bridge the antennas. granted, i live in a poor signal area and his phone had no case. anyone here live in an area with a weak signal been able to get around the problem with a case? reliably?

how about the light sensor? everything i'm reading about it is conflicting. is the problem that it doesn't work at all for some people or is it just a lot more sensitive than on older phones?

how severe is the increase in data usage? i had an iphone 3g, so i guess am i'm asking in comparison to that.

thanks in advance for your time.
 
Live/travel in DC Metro area with lots of dead spots. Adding the case helps but a dead spot is still a dead spot, case or no case. I manage to do just fine although sometimes my calls with get choppy.

Not sure about light sensor and have had no issues here.

My data usage has increased marginally, maybe an extra 50mb a month. I have unlimited so I don't care but I still see what my usage is. If you're big on twitter/FB or whatever, you might notice some increase in traffic but coming from your old phone, I doubt it would be significant increase.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

My new iPhone 4 does not have that signal problem even when I don't have it in a case, not all iP4's have that issue.
 
h1r0ll3r said:
Live/travel in DC Metro area with lots of dead spots. Adding the case helps but a dead spot is still a dead spot, case or no case. I manage to do just fine although sometimes my calls with get choppy.
Click to expand...

it's not really a dead spot issue here so much as a consistently weak local signal. on my 3g, i almost never saw more than 3 bars. i'm sure that's at least a big part of why the antenna thing was so dramatic with the phone i checked out. i know others have had no problems with it but i've only seen that personally in areas where at&t's signal is strong.


h1r0ll3r said:
My data usage has increased marginally, maybe an extra 50mb a month.
Click to expand...

glad to hear that. the highest i ever went was about a quarter gig on my 3g with no wifi for the entire billing period but between the higher resolution and netflix coming, the data caps are a concern.

anyone using the elementcase vapor?
 
mweiland said:
i'm thinking of switching to att and picking up an iphone4 and i have a few questions for anyone that owns one and has a few minutes to spare.

the antenna issue. i know a guy in my area that owns one and heard a lot of bad things from him about dropped calls. he let me check his out and i was able to cause a serious signal drop by touching the spot where you can bridge the antennas. granted, i live in a poor signal area and his phone had no case. anyone here live in an area with a weak signal been able to get around the problem with a case? reliably?
Click to expand...

I live in an area with decent signal, but my bedroom is in the basement of the house I live in where I'm normally hovering around 1-3 bars. Pre-case, I didn't have problems if I wasn't touching the spot, now that I have a case though, I have absolutely no issue.


mweiland said:
how about the light sensor? everything i'm reading about it is conflicting. is the problem that it doesn't work at all for some people or is it just a lot more sensitive than on older phones?
Click to expand...

I don't have the issue at all, so it's only in some models I think. A lot of people seem to say it happens when they use their shoulder to hold the phone, but I don't find it too comfortable to try doing that, so I never do. So I can honestly say I've never cheek-pushed anything since the dimming always worked.

mweiland said:
how severe is the increase in data usage? i had an iphone 3g, so i guess am i'm asking in comparison to that.
Click to expand...

I did the unlimited trick (I switched to AT&T for the iP4) and have that now thinking when the Netflix app comes out I'd be going over. I use an app called Air Video Server and I use Veetle.com about 2 hours a week or so (both stream videos, AVS from your computer, Veetle.com from random channels hosted on the site) and I have JUST gone over 1.5 GB, after owning the iP4 since June 29th. Looking at it now, assuming that cellular network data never resets without telling it to, I'm around 1.6 GB. AVS and Veetle are really the only data-intensive apps I use.

thanks in advance for your time.[/QUOTE]

Hope it helped! :)
 
Without a case I can make my phone go to no service by simply touching the spot on the antena, I can still make it do that with a case but I have to actually cover the whole area with my hand to make it do that, so a case does help but doesn't negate it. However the 3G speeds are still much faster than I ever got on my 3G and call quality is really good as long as I avoid the spot. I live in a pretty good AT&T area, never had a problem with dropped calls before and my nokia flip phone is very reliable on AT&T. The iPhone has never really been great for makin phone calls, but the new one is pretty good as long as you avoid that spot on the antena.

As for the light sensor, not every phone seems to have it. I've gone through 3 iPhone 4, the first one didn't have it all but the second and third one do, with my current one being the worst. It's just ery finicky with how you hold it, so you have to be careful not to move it around too much and holding with your shoulder is pretty futile as it will go bonkers. They said a fix will come with 4.1, if that doesn't do it then I will be exchanging my phone once again.
 
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