A good example of the current level of idiocy on the Web is undoubtedly the whole debate regarding the iPhone 4 reception issues.
The problem seems to be that holding iPhone 4 in a certain way (see the “Death Grip” picture in this post by Neven Mrgan), you can actively weaken the cellular/3G phone signal reception. The signal bars drastically decrease, and this is causing horror and concern.
In recent days, while cleaning up and reorganising my junk once more, I came across the box where I keep all my old mobile phones, all archaeological artifacts from various periods prior to 2007, when the iPhone effectively put an end to their stupid, complicated, and user-hostile interfaces. So I did a little test — of limited scientific value, I’m sure, but interesting nonetheless. I recharged them all, took my Italian SIM card and used it in each one in turn, moving around the apartment holding each phone in various ways. I am in an area where I get excellent Movistar reception (Movistar is my mobile carrier here in Spain and also provides international roaming to my Italian SIM card). Every phone I tried, in fact — from the old Philips Genie to the relatively recent SonyEricsson Z310i and Nokia 6630 — displayed the maximum number of signal bars, when I held the phone normally.
I’ll make this short. It didn’t take long before noticing that, with each of these phones, if I moved my fingers around them, changing the grip and holding them differently, I could find a weak spot and make the phone lose a couple of bars. That’s because it is normal. Of course, each phone has a different sensitivity to that phenomenon for structural reasons. And apparently the iPhone 4 is particularly sensitive in this respect.
As a prospective purchaser of the iPhone 4, I naturally paid attention to this problem, and I soon came to the conclusion that this is really a non-issue.
I want to avoid turning this article into an external link-fest, so I’ll just quote some essential excerpts by John Gruber.
In his excellent and detailed review of the iPhone 4, he writes:
There’s no doubt that [the 3G reception] is an issue for many — but I think a minority — of iPhone 4 owners. I haven’t been able to duplicate the problem on mine, though. Sometimes, but rarely, I can make it drop a single bar, but I can’t duplicate the drop to “No Signal” that many others can.
Best as I can tell, based on the reports I’ve read, including many emails from DF readers, the problem is multivariate. It definitely seems related to signal coverage (or cell tower proximity, or something like that). I’ve received many emails (and a few tweets) from DF readers who can reproduce the problem at will in one location, but can’t in another. Not much help, though, when the problematic location is, say, your home or workplace. But I’ve also heard from a few readers with fellow iPhone 4‑owning friends and colleagues, who’ve been able to test several units side-by-side. Some iPhone 4 units seem more susceptible to the problem than others — which makes me question whether this is something a software update can address. I think it’s a combination of software and manufacturing.
It’s interesting to note how the issue turns up in such a varied and inconsistent way for different users and how, in practice, it doesn’t seem to be so unfailingly reproducible. But let’s move on.
In a subsequent piece, the ironic Translation From Apple’s Unique Dialect of PR-Speak to English of the ‘Letter From Regarding Apple iPhone 4’, Gruber writes:
[The iPhone 4’s antenna] really is a better antenna and gets better reception, overall, than any previous iPhone. That’s really the hell of this whole goddamn situation. It’s like a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ design, except maybe more like three steps forward, because this thing is faster at downloading, 10 times faster at uploading, and most importantly is better at not dropping calls with a weak signal. But, yes, there’s that one step back, wherein it can suffer from unintended attenuation when you bridge the lower-left antenna gap with your skin, and frankly [here Gruber is ironically interpreting Apple’s position] we’re a little pissed that this one step back is getting all the attention.
Irony aside, here there’s a point that, in the heat of all this finger-pointing at the iPhone, seems to escape many: the reception of the iPhone 4 is generally better than previous iPhone models. In the immediately preceding article — iPhone 4 3G Data Performance — Gruber made another interesting test: he measured 3G data performance on three devices: an iPhone 4, an iPhone 3GS and an iPad 3G:
I tested 3G performance on the iPhone 4 twice (three runs each) — once lying on a table, and once while held in my left hand, with my palm spanning the infamous lower-left antenna gap. […]
So I’m seeing download speeds twice as fast as on an iPhone 3GS, and upload speeds over ten times faster. Latency is about an order of magnitude better as well. The iPad doesn’t fare much better than the 3GS.
Holding the iPhone 4 in my hand drops the 3G download speed by about a third, but it’s still faster than the 3GS. Upload speed and latency didn’t seem affected by holding it in my hand.
In the original piece you can see the test results in detail.
