Monthly Archives: June 2010

The iPhone 4 antenna issue

Posted on by

It appears that the external antennas on the iPhone 4 can lose efficacy when held in certain ways. Steve Jobs offers this advice:

Is this problem unique to the iPhone? Well, all cell phones are subject to signal weakening when a human hand covers the antenna. And all modern cell phones have no external antenna. Why? Well, check out this explanation from Spencer Webb at AntennaSys, Inc.:

Just about every cell phone in current production has the antenna located at the bottom.  This insures that the radiating portion of the antenna is furthest from the head.  Apple was not the first to locate the antenna on the bottom, and certainly won’t be the last.  The problem is that humans have their hands below their ears, so the most natural position for the hand is covering the antenna.  This can’t be a good design decision, can it?  How can we be stuck with this conundrum?  It’s the FCC’s fault.

You see, when the FCC tests are run, the head is required to be in the vicinity of the phone.  But, the hand is not!!  And the FCC’s tests are not the only tests that must be passed by a candidate product.  AT&T has their own requirements for devices put on their network, and antenna efficiency is one of them.  I know because I have designed quad-band GSM antennas for the AT&T network.  The AT&T test similarly does not require the hand to be on the phone.

So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements – and efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements!

OK, back to the iPhone 4.  The antenna structure for the cell phone is still down at the bottom (I won’t address the WiFi nor GPS antennas in this blog entry).  The iPhone 4 has two symmetrical slots in the stainless frame.  If you short these slots, or cover them with your hand, the antenna performance will suffer (see this video I found on YouTube).  There is no way around this, it’s a design compromise that is forced by the requirements of the FCC, AT&T, Apple’s marketing department and Apple’s industrial designers, to name a few.

***

So, what’s an iPhone lover to do?  Well, I voted with my dollars.  I ordered my iPhone 4 to replace my Original.  I already know how to do the Vulcan Antenna Grip on the iPhone, and I am wearing out my current model.

And sometimes an antenna that’s not great, but good enough, is good enough.

And here is more from Sascha Segan at PC Magazine:

The “iPhone Death Grip” is somewhat real, but it’s more subtle than a lot of people have been putting on. It’s not a deal breaker and it’s not a reason – by itself – not to buy the iPhone 4. But the nearly hysterical online reaction to the death-grip news reveals what people are really thinking.

First, Apple has issued an official statement, with which I completely agree.

“Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone,” Apple said. “If you ever experience this on your Phone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.”

If I hold the phone in a slightly sweaty left hand, with my fingers covering the three black lines on the phone’s edge and the bottom left corner in my palm, signal strength is somewhat reduced. If I had to pick a number out of the air, I’d say it’s by 3 to 5 decibels per milliwatt (dBm). Feel free to correct me if you have the appropriate lab equipment. The hand involved has to be a little sweaty to encourage conductivity, or the trick might not work.

This doesn’t have any effect on connecting voice calls in areas with a strong signal, but it can make the difference between connecting and not if you’re already in a fringe signal area.

Understanding Apple

Posted on by

I think that Farhad Manjoo, writing in the latest issue of Fast Company, has caught a lot of the essence of the basis of Apple’s success over the past half-decade. He lays out the ten rules of Apple’s success and they all seem spot on. The basic point of all of them, however, is that Apple designs products that please users through a combination of technologies that represent the future and software and implementation that are both beautifully designed and functionally appropriate. And Apple does not focus on feature lists. It focuses on functions and elegance. The article is worth a full read.

Excerpt:

The new MacBook Touch is bendable. Its single OLED screen features a flexible seam, allowing the machine to function as a laptop, a 13-inch tablet, or even a desktop, depending on how you flex it. The computer has half a dozen peripheral ports, includes a stylus, and comes in two colors. And, I should add, it doesn’t exist. It was designed by Tommaso Gecchelin, a student in Venice, Italy, who is unaffiliated with Apple, but is one of a growing subculture of people around the globe who create and share concept designs of the Apple products they’d like to see.

Although many of these illustrated fantasies are quite beautiful, and some are uncannily realistic, their fatal flaw is often the same. They’re larded with features. Apple is about less (those six ports on the MacBook Touch should have been a dead giveaway that this wasn’t an Apple product). Even Gecchelin concedes, “This is not the Apple philosophy.”

Jobs’s primary role at Apple is to turn things down. “He’s a filter,” says the Mac engineer Hertzfeld. Every day, the CEO is presented with ideas for new products and new features within existing ones. The default answer is no. Every engineer who has gone over a product with him has a story about how quickly Jobs reaches for the delete key. “I’m as proud of the products that we have not done as the ones we have done,” Jobs told an interviewer in 2004.

It’s not just Jobs’s consistent aversion to complexity that prompts him to say no. Apple thrives on high profit margins, and having the willpower to say no keeps production costs down. Eliminating features also helps build buzz. “The great thing about omitting a feature that people want is that then they start clamoring for it,” says Reid, the former Apple engineer. “When you give it to them in the next version, they’re even happier somehow.”

Disclosure: I own Apple stock. Nothing posted on this blog should be construed as investment advice.

Walt Mossberg on Apple’s iPhone 4 (updated x2)

Posted on by

He likes it. A lot. Read the whole thing, but this is the take-away:

I’ve been testing the iPhone 4 for more than a week. In both hardware and software, it is a major leap over its already-excellent predecessor, the iPhone 3GS.

It has some downsides and limitations—most important, the overwhelmed AT&T network in the U.S., which, in my tests, the new phone handled sometimes better and, unfortunately, sometimes worse than its predecessor. I’ll get into that below. But, overall, Apple has delivered a big, well-designed update that, in my view, keeps it in the lead in the smartphone wars.

And in other Apple news, they announced today that they have sold 3 Million iPads in only 80 days and there are now over 11,000 iPad apps in the Apps Store.

Update: More hands-on reviews are coming in, like this strongly favorable one from Engadget.

We’re not going to beat around the bush — in our approximation, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market right now. The combination of gorgeous new hardware, that amazing display, upgraded cameras, and major improvements to the operating system make this an extremely formidable package. Yes, there are still pain points that we want to see Apple fix, and yes, there are some amazing alternatives to the iPhone 4 out there. But when it comes to the total package — fit and finish in both software and hardware, performance, app selection, and all of the little details that make a device like this what it is — we think it’s the cream of the current crop.
Update 2: And of course we can’t forget about David Pogue at the NYT.
Despite the strong initial, positive reaction, this must still be a nerve-racking time to be Apple; the iPhone is no longer the only worthy contender. Phones running Google’s Android software are gaining rave reviews and packing in features that iPhone owners can only envy. The Android app store is ballooning, multiple phone makers are competing, and Google updates the software several times a year. Apple releases only one new model a year, so the new iPhone had better be pretty amazing to compete.

It is.

Disclosure: I own Apple stock. Nothing in this blog should be interpreted as investment advice.

Journalism as it should be done

Posted on by

What passes for journalism in most of the mainstream media is nothing more that repeating the statements of interviewees.  There is precious little actual “reporting” as to whether these statements are true. The general practice has evolved into nothing more than “he said, she said” recitations.  The journalistic failure is that very often where claims include facts the reporter simply does not show or state with purported factual statement is true or false. This is often called “balanced” reporting, but is actually not reporting at all.  Some claims are patently false but rarely identified as such.

But if a high schooler can do it, why can’t the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal?

In the beginning was Feed

Posted on by

Can you remember the beginnings of the Internet? Or at least the beginnings of the popularization of the Internet. Way back then, in the mid-90s, there were a few new publications called “webzines”.  The term reflected the underlying assumption that writing on the Net was different, yet the same. Magazines were familiar and webzine were the same, but very very different because they were “published” on the web.  This was bad terminology in that writing is writing, whatever the medium, be it chiseling in granite, pressing ink on paper or using a pen.

Anyway, one of my very favorite “webzines” was called Feed. I loved it and read it without fail. But then it fell off the interwebs. But rejoice: the full archives of Feed are back. And some of its writers continue to be very well known, including the novelist Sam Lipsyte, Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox, media theorist Clay Shirky, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, Talkingpointmemo’s Josh Marshall, and many others. For example, here is an early post from Josh Marshall.

iPad draws blood

Posted on by

The iPad is a smashing success (at least so far). But its success seems to be causing pain elsewhere.

Case in point: today both the Barnes and Nobel Nook and the Amazon Kindle ebook readers suffered significant prices reductions. The Kindle was reduced $70 (to $189) and the 3G Nook was reduced $60 (to $199).  It seems clear that such reductions would not have been necessary absent the iPad. The iPad starts at $499 or $629 the the base 3G version.

Why would anyone pay almost half as much for either of the stand-alone ebook readers when they could get a solid ebook reader in the iPad and so much more?

Disclosure: I am long in AAPL stock. Nothing on this blog should be construed as investment advice.