The iPhone Signal Conundrum

David Monagle

Friday 16 July 2010 04:32

As sure as the interest in the iPhone 4 was unprecedented, so too is the reaction to the issues with the antenna. The press has gone absolutely mad on this, each blog author and even some journalists eagerly quoting other unverified sources to make a splash on their website.

Given that Apple has called a press conference for Friday morning (Pacific Time), I was not going to write about this debacle until the conference was complete. But given there is still the better part of half a day for the media hoards to speculate, I may as well have my say.

Issue 1: The Bars

Interestingly, I live in a marginal coverage area (like the majority of US residents if you believe the media). I with 3 mobile, which is now part of Vodaphone and therefore gives me a grand total of three weak network signals that my phone can see. 3, Vodaphone (shows up as “3”) and Telstra 2G. (shows up as “Roaming”).

I should point out that I do not yet have an iPhone 4 and have only spoken to a few people that do. So much of this will contain speculation as opposed to verified fact.

I believe there are two distinct issues here. The first is straight forward and verifiable. If you wrap your hands around the iPhone, it loses signal strength. Apple released this open letter as their first response to signal issues. They point out that if you wrap your hand around any phone, it will degrade the signal strength.

Now here in Australia, in the CBD, I struggle to replicate this on my 3GS. But at home you can see the results of me doing this in the photo above. Holding the phone by it’s dock connector I am getting 5 bars. Switch to holding the phone in my hand (not a hard grip) and it drops down to two bars. I have repeated this several times and it is easily reproducible in a weak signal area.

Today Apple released iOS 4.0.1 which changes the way signal bars are replicated and also makes the smaller bars a little bigger. I have done similar tests with the update and the drop is certainly less harsh and the bars are more responsive. Holding it in my hand now will still drop my signal to three bars but it flits between three and four. This is a purely aesthetic change and only serves to better educate the consumer as to their signal strength.

Issue 2: The Antenna

But the really big noise has been coming from the crowd claiming that there is a hardware design issue with the new iPhone 4. Some tests published on the internet certainly do seem to prove that touching the stainless steel band on the bottom left of the phone in such a way that your finger bridges the two sides separated by insulating black line, the phone’s ability to send and receive data is hampered or halted. I have also seen demonstrations and spoken to people that cannot reproduce this. So either some iPhone 4s are flawed out of the factory or there are some people out there that affect the antenna more than others.

The final piece of information I can yield on the matter is that Adam Christianson from The MacCast says he has spoken to several people that can reproduce the issue, yet all of them say that the phone has better coverage in more areas and drops less calls than its predecessor.

Either way, with any luck, we shall have more answers tomorrow morning (in Australia). My opinion on the matter is that despite some rather aggressive reporting and some delight being shown by people that Apple may be taken down a peg or two, I don’t believe the problem is as big, or as dire as it’s made out to be. If there were two million Americans out there with expensive iPhone 4s that didn’t work, these media outlets wouldn’t be relying on the odd blog post to prove the issues.