iAntenna 4

To cup or not to cup? Taking the matter in hand. Or not.

Get It Try It

Class actions, email messages, cryptic responses from sjobs - now Apple have issued an open letter on difficulties with iPhone 4 reception.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/07/02appleletter.html

They got the algorithm wrong, they say. They were showing too much reception. And they're now going to start using AT&T's algorithm instead. (But they don't explain what algorithm they've been using up to now.)

Charles Arthur covers the unfolding scandal at the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/02/iphone-4-signal-apple

John Gruber deconstructs Apple's letter in a humorous way but doesn't really add much.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/translation_iphone_4

The BBC hint at something further below the surface.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10490572.stm

BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones calls it 'one of the more embarrassing foul-ups from a major technology company'.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/07/apples_embarrassing_error.html

Pocket-lint report that many of the supposed 'sjobs' responses were faked.

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/34069/steve-job-emails-faked-iphone

Their source was Fortune Tech.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/01/apple-pr-steve-jobs-iphone-4-conversation-is-a-fake/

Daniel Dilger claims people were offered 'faked sjobs' messages but that's Daniel Dilger so all bets are off. Stuart Miles of Pocket-lint asks why Apple should for the first time release a bumper for the device and why other companies don't have the same issue. But it's AnandTech who nail it on the head.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2



'When I first saw the iPhone 4's design spelled out watching the keynote online', writes Brian Klug, 'I immediately assumed that Apple was going to apply an insulative coating atop the stainless steel. Perhaps even use diamond vapor deposition (like they did with the glass screen atop the iPhone 3GS) to insulate the stainless steel from users. We now know rather definitively that this isn't the case. Of course, the result is that anything conductive which bridges the gap in the bottom left couples the antennas together, detuning the precisely engineered antennas. It's a problem of impedance matching with the body as an antenna, and the additional antenna that becomes part of the equation when you touch the bottom left.'

And that could very well explain it.

Apple promise a fix in a few weeks; if AnandTech's Klug is correct, that fix won't be worth much.