Maybe Apple Was Telling the Truth

Everyone from Consumer Reports to Engadget and Gizmodo are up in arms about the iPhone’s antennae issues. They all say that the iPhone’s hardware is flawed. Apple has said that it is all a matter of a software glitch that misrepresents the actual signal the phone is receiving. After two plus weeks of reading opinions and reviews of this phone, I have come to a conclusion. Apple is right.

Evidence, you say. Proof, you ask for. Read on, and your doubt might fade away. First lets look at some of the things people have said about this issue. A good place to start is this Engadget Story. Everyone’s opinion in a nice tidy article. We have Josh Topolsky who lives in Brooklyn who has can reproduce the issue, but that it has not affected his call quality or ability to receive a call. We have Nilay Patel, who lives in Chicago. He experiences the problem much more often the Topolsky, but he admits that “it’s not always perfectly consistent, and sometimes I have no problems at all regardless of how I hold the phone.”

Location, Location, Location

Then we have Laura June, who states that “I cannot get the phone to consistently visually drop bars — in fact, for about the first week, I couldn’t even get the technique at all. I have, however, figured out a way to get it to occasionally drop a bar here or there if I hold it just right, and only then in certain places inside my apartment. That said, I’ve still yet to drop a call on the thing”. She is also in Brooklyn. Then moving across the pond, we have Richard Lai and Vlad Savov. Lai writes: “Three weeks onwards, I can still replicate the signal drop in certain areas in London.” Savov:

“I’ve dropped bars and data rate while operating the phone indoors with the appropriate flesh connection established between my iPhone 4′s antennae…However, stepping outside my bunker-like apartment, I was unable to replicate the problem thanks to the stronger 3G signal available outdoors. I’ve only ever dropped one call, and it was indoors after intentionally squeezing the glass and steel sandwich to try and produce that outcome.”

Stepping outside of the Engadget crew, we have David Pogue, a tech writer for the NY Times: “”I’ve held the phone in the forbidden position maybe 25 times, in different locations, and I’ve only ever seen the bars drop twice. I think it’s heavily dependent on where you are and how the signal strength is. (And once, I saw the bars go UP…)”. Then Harry McCracken in San Francisco: “My experience has been inconsistent — when I’ve intentionally tried to degrade speed by touching the lower left-hand corner I’ve sometimes seen an impact, and sometimes I haven’t.” How much you want to bet that it depends on where in the city he is.

I could go on. But you can hit the link up top to read the rest. If you do, you will notice a common thread. Everyone can see the issue intermittently. I propose that this is a location problem. If they are in a area that has bad signal the phone is reporting a full amount of signal. It is here that they will notice that if they hold the phone “wrong” they will drop a call. This is because the phone never really had any signal to begin with, and holding the phone in the death grip just causes the phone to correctly acknowledge that it has no signal.

It’s a Software Problem

If my hypothesis is correct, then it is not really a hardware problem. Correcting the software so that the phone accurately represents the signal will cause the issue to go away. In places where they have no signal the phone will say it has no signal. No matter how they hold the phone. If they are in an area of good reception, the phone will display accordingly. No matter how they hold the phone.

The majority of unbiased reviewers of the iPhone 4 say that it has overall better reception and call quality than that of any iPhone before it. There will be places where they will be able to make calls where they were not able to before. This is an improvement. When they are in a place where they were never able to make call on the iPhone before, the only thing that has really changed is that the phone is lying to them when it displays 4 or 5 bars. A software update will make the phone more honest.

But What about the Hardware?

For sure there is an argument on the other side of this. The proponents of that argument would ask ” why does the signal display change when the phone is held in the “death grip”?” The answer is simple.

It is a known fact that if you touch a phone’s antennae, you will degrade the quality of the signal it is able to receive. It is true on the iPhone 4, it is true on the first cell phone you ever owned. While the new design of the iPhone for the most part helps the signal quality of the new phone, the placement of the antennae is suspect. It should return to the bottom of the phone. Overall the antenna on the iPhone 4 is an improvement over that of its predecessors, so people are noticing that it does get better reception.

If all phones have this “problem” it is not really a problem of hardware, but a problem of design. if the hole representing the antenna on the iPhone were to be placed on the bottom, people would never have known that there was a software problem.

So we have a solution right? I think so. Once the software update is applied, people will slowly forget that the iPhone has this problem. For the most part people are just upset that they can reproduce something that I can reproduce on any cell phone with an antenna. They are upset that that the phone says they have great signal, when they really don’t. What is actually happening is that touching the antenna in the right spot makes the phone display the correct signal it is supposed to have anyways. This is why when people are in good reception areas, they can still receive calls no matter how they hold the phone. It is like twisting someone’s arm to get them to tell the truth.

So what do you think? Am I totally out of my mind?