Its not left-handed people, its anyone with hands that picks up the phone and uses it in their left hand. I am right handed but use the phone in my left hand to call, and esp to browse the web.
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MacRumors Poll: iPhone 4 Signal Loss by Region
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Its not left-handed people, its anyone with hands that picks up the phone and uses it in their left hand. I am right handed but use the phone in my left hand to call, and esp to browse the web.
There are at least 3 different effects.
1) Blocking the signal with a big bag of salt water (hand).
2) Capacitive loading on the antenna with that same bag of salt water 1 mm or so nearby. (Some of the signal will go into the parasitic capacitor.)
3) Directly shorting together two different lengths of antenna with slightly conductive skin plus salt water (sweat), thus detuning the resonance frequencies.
So:
- All cell phones can have the first effect.
- Cell phones with internal antennas can have the second effect (unless you wrapped your hand around the external whip antenna on your old startak/et.al.)
- The third effect depends on having two non-insulated external antennas. How many new cell phones have that?
I tested the frame on my iPhone 4 with an ohm-meter. I saw no evidence of any sort of coating. It measured less than 1 Ohm all around the frame.
1 in your list can simply be ignored. We all hold cell phone in our hands and our hands don't change that much when swapping cell phones between them.
2 & 3 are the same, or 3 doesn't exist.
There is one reported reception issue. It is the same issue with all cell phones... just by holding the phone, we can decrease reception.
Oh, and do also you hold it with that 'strange club fisted embedding the base of the iphone as deep into your fleshly thumb pad as is humanly possible' style as well?
Again, that makes no sense. In any new situation the information is 'anecdotal, isolated, incomplete, fractured.' Shoot HIV information was that way for about 5 years before it became 'fact'.
That initial information is this way does not make it 'meaningless', the analysis just has to be smart enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to deduce what situation would explain the incoming data.
What do we know:
We know that people who have never had a drop call problem before with any previous version of the iPhone are reporting such in large numbers. These dropped calls are very often happening in exactly the same locations that they weren't being dropped before.
We know that holding the phone in a very specific way that effectively doesn't change the adjacent mass to phone profile significantly is having significant effects on both displayed signal strength, but more importantly the ability to continue on an existing call. make a call with a very small area of the phone not touching skin and the call and bars are fine, move a millimeter or two so that the skin is now touching the phone only in a tiny additional area and the bars drop to zero and the phone loses the call. This behavior is reproducible and consistent in that location.
We know that shorting an antenna is not the same as body mass attenuation of signal (just simple physics there). Hopefully we can agree that body mass attenuation of signal when using cell phones is normal, being able to short out the antenna with normal use is not.
A reasonable person would conclude that something new is going on. Further we know that the base handling of how the 3G radio worked with cell towers was rewritten with a fundamentally different objective for iOS 4.
Again, pretending that it is just pure serendipity that suddenly all these people losing calls just 'happen' to have new iPhone 4s is just such a stretch.
Now your concern seems to be this is mass hysteria caused by a Gizmodo article and that people are fretting about merely 'losing bars' when we all know that grabbing any cell phone in marginal areas makes you lose bars. yes, that is an issue but even if Gizmodo isn't technically right what they are talking about is part of what's really going on. But we aren't talking about what they are - its not about merely 'dropped bars' its about 'dropped calls'.
I'm not fooled by things like that, I don't even read Gizmodo. I am very objective - my new iPhone 4 is losing calls at my home from the moment I started using it, where I have used an iPhone as my primary communication link for years and never had this problem. Further, my problem is solved by putting the 4 in an old silicone Encase for the 3GS.
Just because 'studies' haven't been done yet doesn't make the information that is available 'meaningless' - studies are eventually done expressly because of the existence of this kind of information.
If you have a really old analog UHF TV with channels between 70 and 84, you can check for TV interference in the 850 MHz band when you make a phone call near the TV antenna.
See? As far as I'm concerned that's the only way to hold a cell phone. You grab it with its center of mass at the center of your grip. With a normal lengthen hand that puts the left bottom corner firmly into the muscle of the thumb.
I don't have doll hands, I don't hold the phone like I'm a princess, never have and probably never will. More importantly never had to with any previous iPhone to get it to work properly.
Interesting. I hold mine in my fingertips - 3 along the outer edge, one on the top and the thumb tip on the inner edge (near centre)
Are you left handed?
2 and 3 are completely different.
2 requires surface area for the capacitor, you can't do it with something tiny,
like with the very tip of your little finger.
3 only requires a shorting object, a tiny pin head in touching the metal gap between two antennas.
A simple explanation is that you have a signal far far stronger than needed for 5 bars at your house. Anyplace line-of-sight or near a high-power cell tower might have that.
So at your house you could be losing a massive amount of signal, from way way above 5 bars to "only" 5 bars.
Well honestly that's what I'm talking about when I say 'holding it like a princess'.
I mean they are all multi hundred dollar device - my point of view is 'why would I hold it in such a precarious way?' particularly since I do so much right handed input in the thing? I'm not going to hold it that way to put input into it, why would I shift its position in my hand to merely bring it up to my ear?Nope right handed. Do have a bit of nerve damage in my left hand but I've always held cell phones (calculators, etc) this way even before that happened. And in typing that I would have to say that holding a calculator that way was probably the precursor of the habit before there even were cell phones. Firmly in hand, back against the palm, thumb bracing the left side, all the fingers around the right, locked into place.
And you don't see where you are being obtuse. You have your memories, and a single phone to base judgements on. Your memories are not science, and are suspect. The observations you make about your experiences with a single phone don't amount to much. Even if you add them to all the other people's experiences with a single phone... still a lot of nothing.
All you know, and all you can say in truth, is that YOU in YOUR LOCATION are experiencing reception issues with your ONE PHONE.
If you had 2 phones, you'd then have the absolute bare minimum to be claiming and believing what you are claiming and believe. For you to be able to even remotely make a rigorous scientific conclusion, you'd need, say, a dozen iPhone 4 's, and another couple dozen other branded cell phones, and a dozen tests in a dozen locations. And even then you would be in a precarious position to state fact. All you could do is report results.
Actually, it does. Without the studies, the tests, all reported observations (of this kind) are meaningless because we don't know a crap load of variables that existed at the time of the observations.
Unfortunately Bob, the internet (including web forums) has become overrun with sensation seekers, blatant liars, corporate shills, astro-turfers, malcontents, deviants or just plain bored people with nothing better to do than offer up opinion as fact or muck about.
Realistically there maybe an issue but only Apple can really diagnose the truth in the matter. If it's true, they will most likely issue a humiliating and expensive public apology and recall, rebate or replacement fix if the said matter does turn out to be an unresolvable engineering fault.
However, until that point we should bear in mind that it is in the most substantial commercial interests of just about every other manufacturer of phones to utterly destroy the credibility of the iPhone. I have an iPhone 4 and I have no problems - this maybe why some people are saying 'let's not get crazy right now'
yeah... we're going to call them the same because not only do they appear quite similar when you do them, the effect it has, when you do either, is apparently identical: the same loss of reception. You're de-attenuating the antenna in both cases.
See you sound like a flat earth society member arguing and discounting all the information you don't like. A person with a single cell phone in a single location with single change is about the best 'anecdotal' information you could get. You are basically saying you would even consider any information if you reject information like that.
All you know, and all you can say in truth, is that YOU in YOUR LOCATION are experiencing reception issues with your ONE PHONE.
Again, a very controlled environment - the only difference would be if I had multiple cell phones and I'd be set to start a study. Again, are you saying my 'ONE PHONE' is defective? Or that the location has some how miraculously changed at the exact moment I put my iPhone 4 on line? And that friends who know nothing about the controversy spontaneously call specifically to ask if I'm having dropped call problems? [/QUOTE]
AGain, you are basically saying you aren't going to listen to anyone - why bother talking about the subject if you aren't allowing any new input?
Well honestly that's what I'm talking about when I say 'holding it like a princess'.
Nope right handed. Do have a bit of nerve damage in my left hand but I've always held cell phones (calculators, etc) this way even before that happened. And in typing that I would have to say that holding a calculator that way was probably the precursor of the habit before there even were cell phones. Firmly in hand, back against the palm, thumb bracing the left side, all the fingers around the right, locked into place.
Princess - lol!
Now, I'm not saying one way of holding a phone is better or more masculine than another, but you've definitely got problems if you've been holding calculators to your ears and trying to make telephone calls for years ;-)
...But seriously, what if Apple were genuinely to state that it's just incompatible with certain grips - that it was an inherency of the design - like a Porsche 911 has it's engine over the back wheels ( which everyone thinks crazy) but works incredibly well...would you return the phone?
No no no.
You are not in a controlled environment. You are completely wrong about most of the things you've stated.
Forget we're talking about a phone for a minute. Pretend we're arguing about a frog. You have one frog. How the hell can you make any statements about any other frog, or even claim there is something different about your frog when you have no other frogs to compare it to?
OMG, why am i bothering?
Believe what you wish.
Fortunately even with what we know that's probably not the issue - isolating the antennas with a 'bumper' bumps us back to just body mass attenuation which is totally within the norm for cell phones.
As to a public apology, I wouldn't hold my breath - if they can do this with a software fix (make the phone handle the rapidly dropping signal in time to keep the call from disconnecting) it will just happen with not much said -the problem will just go away and oddly the next version of the iPhone 4 (or even a stealth upgrade) will have plastic over the stainless steel.
Agreed, but having people knee jerk say there is no problem when there obviously is just make the problem worse. What you do is say 'there is a problem but its going to be a pretty easily fixable one' and people will go 'oh ok'. Because the phone is very sweet - when it doesn't drop your calls.
Yeah and if I lived in the neighborhood I ate dinner in last night I wouldn't be having problems either - I had 5 bars grabbing the naked phone (as opposed to 'just 5' when at home and 0 and dropped calls if grabbed naked.
This definitely a 'location' problem, a 'holding' problem, maybe a 'software' problem and maybe even a unit one - some are reporting trading in their phones and then having no problems (though I am incredulous on that being objectively true).
Still ignoring the problem won't fix it or make it go away and if people don't talk about the problem the wrong one might be fixed or the important one might not be fixed at all.
We can surely talk about it here - no one is going to talk to the potential buying masses about what they read on MacRumors.