What's the Problem With iPhone 3G Reception? 322
CWmike writes "Apple's iPhone 3G was just a couple of days old when reports began trickling onto the company's support forum from dissatisfied customers complaining about poor reception. Although no one outside of Apple and AT&T — and maybe a chipmaker or two — really knows, that has not kept others from speculating, or in a few cases, making claims based on unnamed sources. What's going on? We may not have all the answers, but we do have questions. Gregg Keizer put together everything we know in a FAQ on the griping about iPhone 3G reception."
"I love the phont, but..." (Score:3, Insightful)
What's wrong with you? How would you "love" your phone if you can't use it for its primary purpose? Is it mandatory to "love" this phone? Would you burn in hell if you don't? Or most of the people just lack balls to say that you don't "love" it anymore?
Mass acceptance by following the herd is one thing, not having guts to call a spade a spade is another.
Re:"I love the phont, but..." (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"I love the phont, but..." (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not cognitive dissonance, it's called imagination. The ability to imagine how the iPhone would be if it didn't drop all the time. It is that which he is in love with.
And it can be fixed.
Re:"I love the phont, but..." (Score:2, Insightful)
[sigh] wankers like you are far more rabid than the average mac user.
Re:"I love the phont, but..." (Score:5, Insightful)
What's wrong with you? How would you "love" your phone if you can't use it for its primary purpose? Is it mandatory to "love" this phone? Would you burn in hell if you don't? Or most of the people just lack balls to say that you don't "love" it anymore?
I think what he is trying to say "When it works, its works better than anything else out there in terms of functionality or meeting my personal preference."
Its like old Ultima Online. I loved to play that game to death but the game client was so damn buggy it crashed all the damn time.
It was a very love hate relationship. Sure I could play text muds, but it wasn't the same.
Hope that makes.
Re:The Apple Product Cycle. (Score:2, Insightful)
... except that, from all appearances, this actually is a terrible design flaw, and it can neither be described as "minor" nor "rarely-occurring".
Re:"I love the phont, but..." (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"I love the phont, but..." (Score:1, Insightful)
Because it's primary purpose isn't a phone! It's a fashion accessory. It's to make you look cool, or well-off, hip, etc. And yes, a lot of people won't admit to no longer liking a consumer product they own. Being someone who waited at midnight makes it hard to go back and say "I was an idiot". As did overpaying for something with a multi-year contract when you factor out the total cost of ownership. And it has a cult-like following and your former brethren will turn on you like you're a heretic if you mention your doubts in public. Best to just keep quiet.
Re:My experiences (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of sad that this is the first thing on peoples' minds. Would you not prefer Apple to recall the phones for a fix, or issue a firmware update that takes care of the problem? No.... you were wronged and therefore must sue.
Re:The real summary. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:My experiences (Score:5, Insightful)
Some lawsuits are about vengeance; but that doesn't mean that lawsuits aren't a legitimate means of obtaining redress.
Re:The Apple Product Cycle. (Score:4, Insightful)
By what I've read on the net it seems like every new iPhone is affected.
Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Many iPhones have absolutely no problems, including mine (UK, on O2 network). It is worth considering that most people with a problem will complain, whereas most without one won't bother visiting discussion groups etc.
Re:WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know if this is a joke or not... The general drive to push products at an increasing speed forces the manufacturers to push out sub-standard devices on the market.
And many of the devices are programmed mainly in C/C++ which we all know is a double-edged technology since it gives good performance but it is also prone to weird bugs like wild pointers etc.
Lots of uninformed speculation, little data (Score:5, Insightful)
We've got one _securities_ (not engineering) analyst speculating that it's a problem with the chipset, and that it's unfixable. Yeah. Then we've got Businessweek echoing that claim, citing two unnamed sources (one of which is probably the securities analyst, the other of which is likely someone repeating the securities analyst). No technical data whatsoever on those claims.
Then we've got Ny Teknik, which cites a problem between the antenna and the amplifier (I would speculate they are referring to antenna impedence matching). They again cite unnamed sources, but they at least claim there was actual testing done. If this is the case, it would not be fixable in firmware, but it's at least not a design flaw.
On top of that, there's the nature of the problems. Poor signal strength and low speeds both could be caused by the problems of the nature Ny Teknik suggests, but dropping calls when switching from 3G to Edge argues for some sort of firmware problem, dropping calls during the handoff. Of course, it's also possible there are multiple problems; low signal strength exposes a problem with the handoff.
Finally there's the question of how Apple missed it during testing. It seems widespread enough that it would have been noticed, which argues for a manufacturing problem or perhaps a last minute software change.
Re:People, people, people: same stuff, new package (Score:2, Insightful)
Not True (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Samsung handsets use the same Infineon 3G chipset and side by side have been shown to not have the same problems as the iphone
2)I have an iphone. It worked great for 1 week and then the data service stopped working.
The phone hasnt changed. It's a network issue. As more iphones have come on in big cities they just cant serve the demand.
So its the phone which could be performing better (as seen by the side by side Sansung comparison) >and its the network (as seen by many people whose service only recently went to hell but used to be fine)
Re:"I love the phont, but..." (Score:3, Insightful)
(Sorry, some of this will sound US-centric, cuz I am.....I'm pretty sure these concepts apply to other markets too....lemme know.)
Haven't you noticed that people in general seem afflicted with that "love of cellphone"?
"I love my phone, but..." your carrier, [Verizon|AT&T|Sprint|etc], sucks and you're obligated to them for how long???
All phones are insanely expensive when you consider the contract. (Why the f**k do I even need a contract again???) Even a bottom-end phone on a pay-go plan is stoopid expensive. As companies, pretty much all the carriers blow massive chunk themselves so there's no getting away from this just by bagging on the iPhone. (Those with experience using all the carriers, please chime in to confirm/deny.)
Using an iPhone with a bug in this context isn't going to noticeably bring any more "suck" into the equation. It'd be like having 500 Suck Points while using your old phone+contract just because it's a cellphone with a contract, but then you get 8 bonus Suck Points when you get an iPhone. Shee-it...you get 5 Suck Points just for upgrading your phone at all - no matter the phone! The three extra for an iPhone with a bug are not enough to worry about. Not only that but the issue will almost surely be worked out with a software update later. That's not something that's going to stop cell phones or their service providers from royally sucking [consumeraffairs.com] though. Further,the iPhone is arguably a better phone than the others even with that bug.
Good luck with that and hang up your damn phone! ;)
-Matt
Re:Lots of uninformed speculation, little data (Score:4, Insightful)
Then we've got Ny Teknik, which cites a problem between the antenna and the amplifier (I would speculate they are referring to antenna impedence matching). They again cite unnamed sources, but they at least claim there was actual testing done. If this is the case, it would not be fixable in firmware, but it's at least not a design flaw.
I find it hard to believe that they would screw up the impedance match. Impedance matching is the most basic precept in RF design. And if they did screw it up, wouldn't that be a design flaw?
Re:"I love the phont, but..." (Score:5, Insightful)
A feature list does not a product make. If (like me) you were keeping an eye out for a decent, featureful phone in the years before the iPhone came out, then you probably noticed a few phones with incredible feature lists that major phone companies developed but never sold in major markets. Despite the phones' impressive feature lists, they weren't good enough to carry the company logo in a major market like Japan, Korea, or the US. The ones they did sell in the US were just barely usable enough for buyers who craved those features and were willing to put up with a lot of clunkiness, so you can imagine how bad the phones were that they only sold in China.
So then the iPhone came out, and I was like, "Yay, now someone has figured out how to make a feature-filled phone with a decent interface that isn't the size of my fist. Any day now some non-evil carrier will have one. Yay! I can't wait." And I waited for a frickin' year while the cell phone companies continued to come out with crap. I was counting on them to AT LEAST clone the iPhone and come out with a "good-enough" copy of it, maybe a year behind and slightly less stylish, but what does that matter to a hopeless dork like me anyway.
Well, they did take the iPhone seriously. They ran around saying "iPhone competitor" and "iPhone killer" so often it sounded like a religious mantra. But if you judged by the phones they released, it was like they had never seen an iPhone before. They kept making awkward stylus-based smart phones and cooked up a few pathetic "iPhone competitors" like the LG Venus. It became clear that not only were the cell phone makers not going to match the iPhone in 2008, they aren't even on pace to match the original iPhone for years. Certainly not in 2009, unless an Android-based product turns out to have an Apple-like (i.e., highly polished right off the bat) debut.
So today, this very minute actually, I'm walking out the door to buy an iPhone. (How many times I've posted something on Slashdot in defense of the iPhone and wished I could say that! Um, well, two or three times at least.)
I'll sell my soul to AT&T, despite their shameful cooperation with the un-American acts of my embarrassingly un-American American government, because the gap between the iPhone and second-best is just too embarrassingly large. I won't put up with it anymore.
And as usual I'll add my caveat that I'm not interested in a Blackberry, "smart phone," or PDA, so I'm not claiming the iPhone is the clear leader, or even the best product, in those markets.
Re:My experiences (Score:3, Insightful)
Some lawsuits are about vengeance; but that doesn't mean that lawsuits aren't a legitimate means of obtaining redress.
True. It just means that you're American.
(tongue only partly in cheek)
Success for the Ericsson PR-crew in Scandinavia? (Score:1, Insightful)