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didnt work for me

this solution definitely didnt work for me - applied the insulating tape very carefully - I still get signal bars drop from full 5 to 2. All being said, at home I generally cant makes any phone calls due to poor reception but I can with my iphone 4 if i hold it "correctly" - best reception of any phone I've had, I'm buying the bumper..
 
I don't know if this helps..but as my reception bars were dropping (holding the phone in the 'death grip' manner), I starting stroking my cat...and all of a sudden the full 5 bars appeared. I then took my hand off the now purring pusscat and the bars start dropping sequentially like a dramatic '24 Jack Bauer' bomb explosion countdown sequence.

I now have to find a way of carrying my cat in a rucksack everywhere I go, in case I need to make a phone call. For all that...it is still a magical device that changes everything...again !

Made me laugh

I am now running to the pet shop as I type
 
please stop what you are trying to do/fix.

Before you end up voiding your warranty because you decide to tape the sim tray and cause it to jam inside the slot and you can't pull the tape out ending up having to disassemble the iPhone to try to do so.

Guys - let's be realistic. Apple put years of work into building these devices. Let's let them deal with it rather than try to cut up our sim cards or put a bandaid tape to prevent signal dropping. I know we are all desperate for a fix but here's something really ironic:

I don't want steve jobs to tell me to hold it differently or put a rubber case over my iPhone. Even though I am fighting him to not have to install a case over my beautiful phone which just defeats the purpose of designing something so beautiful, I know deep down inside me that I'm going to slap a fxking case over it anyway even if he told me NOT to put one on.

the whole thing is just stupid - having to do this and that to fix these issues. It's only been 5 days for most since the launch. I will give apple some time to come out with a solution or just announce there is officially nothing wrong before I attempt another DYI fix.

It's a fantastic phone and works so well if you have some case over it. Why not just enjoy your device for now and just let it go. There aren't enough macrumor users here to make a dent in Mr. Job's opinion and for a fact, he never listens to any one of you. If he did, the iPhone 3G would of have had everything the iPhone 4 has now.
+1 Apple is HUGE, regardless of what most people think, I can't imagine the CEO of such a large corporation would be ignorant to the problems of his flagship product. I don't have the reception issues most others are claiming which leads me to believe that no everyone is suffering from this. Which also leads me to believe that this has to either be location specific, and or fixable via software. I will give Apple a chance to respond to this before I pass judgement.
 
Worked for me. In my office, where my iPhone3G worked just fine, my iPhone4 had not data receptiion at all and no bars -- incoming voice calls went directly to voicemail and outgoing calls dropped immediately if they connected at all. I just tried the SIM removal and reinsertion this morning -- no tape, just took out the SIM and put it back in --and it seem to have worked for me. I am showing 3 bars and I'm now getting 500kbps of data transfer.

Regards

John
 
it works

Hi guys from the uk using a o2 sim... this solution seems to be working for me ... just. I found that the i was not able to cut the sim card down. the gold chip is bigger than the tray so the only solution is to use tape, i only have brown tape and applyed it so no contact is made to the tray. It seemed to make a difference...going out to buy some electrical tape now maybe it will work even better.
 
I have a much mire peculiar problem, there are times when I'm on 3G with full bars and the phone is completely non responsive, it takes ages for safari or maps to respond.
 
No one is saying everyone has yellow spots, or that everyone has the signal problem.

arn

on the contrary, more than one post has suggested ALL phones have the signal issue. that those of us who have never seen the issue are being fanboys.


Let's look at this 'fix.' On the original post in the first 10 pages, 13 people said it worked for them. 27 people said it did NOT work. Those people were told they did not put it in right. Or use the right tape. And of the 13 people who said it worked, 7 recanted and said the issue came back.

so.. all this is about 6 maybe cases against 34 no's.

really?

and you say science is not needed?

It opens my eyes that people seem to be encouraging others to modify their sim cards based on 6 maybes versus 34 no's. MacRumors should be discouraging that.
 
I trimmed my Sim card down, restart my phone, put the bumper case back and now I have great signal no matter how I grab it.
 
I guess I'm gonna try it... The OP didn't stick any tape in there though, did he? It didn't say he does. I'll try it with the tape, though... If I can get a piece of electrical tape that small to not jam up my sim tray. That would REALLY suck.
 
It works everyone who has one try it!!!!

MacRumors should be discouraging that.

i think the whole point of this forum is to tell people of your own experiences, to have mac rumors discourage users not to do things is silly we are all adults...

You don't need to cut the sim card... i think all you need to do is stop the contact of the gold sim with the tray (it's quite fiddley and took me a couple of times as it would say 'sim card not inserted' just make sure when looking at the sim card in the tray there's at least 1 to 2mm of tape you can see (BTW i'm still using normal brown tape as it's quite thin & have not had any sim tray jams) ... i've done it this way and it's working much better for me (instead of total signal loss i'm only dropping by two bars). this is my experience...i have not cut my sim card at all.
 
I just tried it. Cut a printer label with a blade into a small strip. Stuck it to the tray and tried one on the sim. No difference from before.
 
Just tried it.

I didn't use any tape. I didn't want to risk a jam. I tried for 20 minutes to cut just the right size and gave up. But I put my sim back in, tried bridging the antennas, and it won't bridge. I don't lose any bars now. Weird. I'll be reporting if it was better or worse by the end of today.
 
We have two iPhone 4's. A 16GB, and a 32GB. My wifes 16GB has it a lot worse than me.

I tried it with my wife's. Did not work.

Mine went away after I had the "No SIM card installed" error message. I isolated it to actually be the SIM card by swapping my wife's and mine around. Called Apple, they sent me to AT&T. Swapped it out, now I don't have any signal issues.

The AT&T rep said these SIM cards are brand new, made basically for this phone, maybe there were manufacturing defects in the SIM cards. The rep said the phone won't make them go bad, they will just kaput by themselves.

I have faith in Apple, and I am reserving judgement until they either, find the problem and fix it, or release an official statement.


Could it really be this easy!? That would be great!!!
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the SIM card just authorize your phone to use the AT&T towers? I didn't think they had ANYTHING to do with data transfers or calls. Pretty sure that is all in the antenna, and the SIM just authorizes if your phone is allowed to use their towers or not. Don't see how this could effect signal or data myself.

(I tried it anyways...and it did nothing for me)
 
Out of curiosity I took my SIM out, put it back in, and restarted my phone. I ran speedtest in my office at work. Previously I would get normal download speed here, but the death grip would reduce my signal to almost zero. Now the death grip does not seem to have any noticeable effect. I don't know if this actually fixed anything or if my phone just found a better tower, but it is certainly interesting!
 
does this mean it IS AT&T's fault then?!? bad sim cards?

i do love that apple is looking for antenna engineers. the previous ones were sent packing friday night!
 
Why is everyone trying to make a scientific study out of it. It's like when people complain that their iMacs have a yellow spot, or their iPod doesn't turn on. The response is NOT "well, I don't believe it's a real problem, we need a randomized controlled multicenter study to see if it's real."

Not everything needs a scientific study for it to be real.

I agree the problem is varied and somewhat vague, but there are clear extremes of examples of problems (signal stopping cold with a touch). You can't simply ignore all the evidence under some bastardized call for "science".

arn

Because a computer not powering on or off is an easy to identify problem. Yellow spots on a screen are pretty clear.

Bars dropping when people hold a phone a certain way in some places and not others which may or may not result in calls being dropped is far from clear. (It is actually a loose collection of anecdotes that may or may not be related). The problem in this case is far from being identified. We have a collection of anecdotes on both side, none of which measure anything at all. Is there a problem sure. How do we know from the evidence we have that the bars dropping is not purely cosmetic and the calls dropping is not purely a factor of the proximity sensor issue many people have identified. Some people have Internet slow down when the bars drop other people do not.


It is doubtful that everyone claiming to have this issue are even experiencing the same problem, based on the wide variety of conditions and results we have seen. If we believe everyone who claims to have this problem, we must believe there is more than one problem and they are unrelated.
The difference between this issue and the others you mentioned is fairly clear.
 
That is absurd. Glad they are hiring but if they are just now trying to find the answer from a new hire, means no fix expected soon.

Maybe Apple fired their current antenna engineers who missed this problem

Exactly...

I mean why on earth would they look for not 1 but 3 new antenna engineers!?!?

LOL in any case...
 
No that doesn't mean that it is AT&T's fault at all. It could simply be a bad batch of Micro Sim cards from the manufacturer. Or it may not be.

The issues are not US centric though.

just a laugh. poking at the majority of people who hate at&t
 
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