I don’t own an iPhone, never have, and probably never will. When it comes to this antenna issue I can’t say that I know what iPhone owners who have the issue are going through. Wait a minute! Yes I can!
You see I own a cell phone and the last two phones I have owned have had stickers on them clearly stating if the phone is held in “this specific place” reception could drop. In fact it did drop and I lost calls every time I held the phone in that spot. On my previous phone I had to train myself not to hold the phone a specific way than I was used to holding it.
I didn’t get a free case for either phone, I didn’t even get an apology from the company. I didn’t return the phones either. I kept them because I liked them and I learned to deal with it.
So, when Steve Jobs says all phones have these issues. He is right. They don’t even have to be a complex smartphone. My phones have been little slider or flip phones, that I don’t even text on.
Should the little slot on the iPhone been in another location to prevent it from being easily touched? Perhaps, but it isn’t.
If I had an iPhone and had these issues I would either return the phone if it really annoyed me, or get a case. I’d probably already have a case to protect the phone anyway.
To tell you the truth the reception issue didn’t bother me at all with my old phone. What drove me crazy was the fact that the phone would start making phone calls in my pocket when I sat the wrong way! Now that is annoying! How about a fix for that???
While I understand you position, this is not the same. I have owned MANY, and I mean MANY cell phones in my life, and none has had a problem as bad as this one.
And personally, I do not believe this is about covering the spot, because with a case in place, you can cover it all you like. My engineering theory is that the bands around the edge ARE the antenna, and the slots isolate the antennas from each other. When you hand covers the slot, you are actually using your hand to “connect” two antenna together, thus changing the antenna matching on two or more antenna, and signal strength goes down.
Some people may not see this as much as others, it will depend on how you hold it, and how conductive your skin is at any given moment.
For me, even with the new software, when I hold the phone like you would naturally hold this device, I drop from four bars to one, and the 3G indicator goes off. No other phone I have ever owned dropped that much.
Put a case on it, and the problem went away, but now my phone is hidden in the case. Sad.
But seriously, Steve saying “Other phones do it” is like a two year old pointing at his friend and saying “He did it too.”‘ I guess we just expect more from Apple, and while this whole this is blown totally out of proportion, it was not handled well in my opinion.
Even AT&T said they could not have tested for this problem because Apple insisted all tests be done with the mock 3GS case on the device. They would never have seen this in user testing.
Sadly for me, the number of dropped calls is my big issue. Steve said less than 1 call per 100, but the average for number of calls dropped is near 1 in 100 for all phones, so that means this phone drops calls twice as much as other phones. Another fact hidden in a clever statistic.
As for sending it back…not happening. I really like the phone, and cell phones have ALWAYS taught me to expect the worse from technology, so I will not be disappointed at all! 🙂
Where are the men (or women) of science when we need them?
I have yet to see any quantified, verifiable, and repeatable (“If it ain’t repeatable it ain’t science, sonny” as my granny always said patronizingly) evidence that the problem actually exists outside the minds of the many, many people who have had many, many phones, and I do mean many. This is known as anecdotal evidence, no matter how many phones may or may not have been owned.
The hysteria reminds me of Nancy Grace from Court TV during the allegations against Scott Lee Peterson following the death of his wife Laci: graceless Nancy would do a double thumb and pinkie phone sign to indicate that ‘guilty’ would be a safe conviction on the grounds that the guy had once been seen using two phones. I tend to agree.
Show me the science.