iPhone 4 Antenna Issue Part 4,328.7

So, today there is all sorts of iPhone Antenna news, but I’ll start with the big one: iOS 4.01 is out. Go grab it from iTunes. I’ll wait.

This update reworks the system used to calculate how many bars you phone shows in any given signal strength area using a much more rational formula. It includes only this one change. It appears that rumors were correct and the iOS 4.1 beta released earlier this week was just an initial beta release of a version that will be coming along later. Apple also released iOS 3.2.1 for iPad, which fixes some WiFi connectivity issues and a few other issues (and notably gives iPad users access to Bing in Safari like with iOS 4 on iPhone).

And that brings me to the second bit of iPhone 4 Antenna news… I said before that AnandTech had put out the “final word” on the iPhone 4 antenna issue. His page on the reception issue the comprehensive review article was the best description of the issue out there until today, when Anand and Brian released a new four-pager on the subject, including a look at the changes in the bar-meter iOS 4.1 beta (out today in the form of iOS 4.01).

When You Don’t Count Everything He’s Accomplished, He Hasn’t Accomplished Anything!

I refuse to link to the Politico if I can help it, and besides, John Cole’s headline is better. But Roger Simon actually said something not terribly wrong:

Who would have thought just a matter of months ago that the Republicans would be the party of enthusiasm? The Republicans were the party of tired old white men who had just been thrashed by the magnetic and mesmerizing Obama, whose words flowed like silver from his lips.

Then, a terrible thing happened: Obama began to do things. He saved the economy from disaster. He provided new medical coverage for children. He passed historic health care reform for the entire nation.

But who turned on him? Liberal Democrats. Eric Alterman, a liberal author and columnist for The Nation, wrote recently: “Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment.”

I admit, I did not go on to read the remaining 17,000 words of the article — I am saving it for my next coma — and that is because I had trouble grappling with the phrase “significant accomplishments notwithstanding.” If you toss significant accomplishments out the window, how would FDR or Abraham Lincoln or George Washington do by that standard?

Aren’t significant accomplishments what presidents are supposed to accomplish? And isn’t it more than a little unfair to toss those accomplishments aside and then judge those presidents?

For The Record

I’ve still had no reception problems with my iPhone 4. Certainly nothing that I can link to the way I hold it, and I’m absolutely not commonly in “strong signal” areas. It has generally had better reception than my older phones (of both iPhone and non-iPhone varieties). I’m not using a case yet. I haven’t decided if I will or won’t in the end, but it has been above expectations for me so far.

I did, however, have a lot of issues using my phone over the July 4th weekend. Despite having completely adequate signal strength, I was often unable to place a call, and using the cellular data connection was hopeless. This was NOT limited to my iPhone 4 though. My entire family was here visiting for the week, and my dad’s iPhone 3GS, my wife’s 3GS, and our friends AT&T smartphones all suffered the same fate. I think the number of people who descended upon Bar Harbor for the weekend was too much for the network to bear. By Tuesday, everything seemed to be working again (though data remained flaky and slow for another day).

AT&T obviously needs to improve their backhaul here in town.

Oh, and Consumer Reports? Try to make up your mind, will you?

Still… This story won’t seem to go away. Apple needs to do something about it. The simplest solution would seem to be to drop the price on the bumper covers (free would be ideal, but a large price drop of $15-$25 would probably go a long way too).

UPDATE: I’m posting this from my iPhone 4, holding my phone in my left hand.

John Gruber Is Brilliant

If you are a huge nerd like me, you undoubtedly already heard, but Apple issued a letter on their website this morning addressed to “iPhone 4 Users”. Surprising no one, the letter concerns the widely-reported “reception issue” with the new iPhone 4. The letter effectively confirms what AnandTech reported after their extensive testing earlier this week: That, just like basically every other competing smartphone, that the iPhone 4 reception does suffer a bit when you hold it in a certain way, but that the overall reception of the iPhone 4 (even when held wrong) is dramatically improved over the previous generations of iPhones. However, they admit:

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

Which is effectively what AnandTech explained with this chart:

AnandTech published this graph showing the relation between signal strength in dB and the Bars on the iPhone

I took this chart, and converted it into a pie chart showing the distribution of the available dynamic range per-bar. When you look at it this way, it is quite clear that the scale used by Apple in the iOS software is completely compressed and distorted. This was done, obviously, to make the phone more likely to report 5 bars. As you can see, the dynamic range of the third bar is almost nothing (comprising only from -103 to -101 dB), compared to the ranges for the fourth and fifth bars.

Chart showing the relative dynamic range of the reception bars in iOS 4

With their forthcoming iOS patch, Apple is going to “fix” this, to be more in line with “AT&T’s recommendations.” Now, until today, there were no standards in the industry for how cell phone reception bar graphs are constructed. It has generally been up to each individual phone vendor to design their own system, which has led to situations just like what we have illustrated above. There is, of course, a real motivation for phone vendors to skew their reception graphs just like Apple did above, because consumers would compare different phones to each other using these graphs (and the one that shows five bars more often is obviously better, even if it isn’t). Apple has now apparently put pressure on AT&T to come up with some sort of standard. We’ll have to see if it is actually a more fair representation of the available range, but it almost certainly can’t get any worse.

So, you might be wondering, why is John Gruber brilliant? Well, for many reasons, but today he put up a hilarious “translation” of the Apple letter on his site. Check it out. It’s funny because it’s true.

All Things Go, All Things Go

This is just awesome:

Terrible video quality, but the sound isn’t too horrible, and they really do an amazing job. Watch it through if you can, they get really good closer to the end.

And all that malware crap on your Windows computer? Looks like the conventional wisdom is wrong, as usual, and it probably isn’t from all the porn you’re surfing.