There was a wire in the rod. The antenna was two parts: a coil at the base was the antenna when the rod was pushed in, and when the antenna was extended the coil coupled to the rod, so the rod was the radiating element.

I've had phones like that, but I'm pretty sure that that was not the case with the MicroTAC.

Because this (admittedly random) website says so.

If Nige (my old digital electronics lecturer) says so, then I believe him!

"A Greater Manchester University" is possibly an even cheekier slogan than the one on the ads at Cambridge railway station that say "Welcome to Cambridge, home of Anglia Ruskin University".

Peter

One would assume they meant this usage of "greater":

Don't believe him. I worked there in the 90's, and when the antenna was down a lot of work had to be done to ensure the antenna didn't radiate into the phone due to non-infinite isolation between the coil and whip.

Yes, "Greater Manchester" is the formal name of the county containing Salford. It's a play on words. I'm just saying it's a bit of a cheeky one, considering their long-standing competition and rivalry with "Manchester University", which is a separate institution.

Peter

3G doesn't have an autofocus camera, so that's why it doesn't work there. 3GS/4 have AF cameras.

The thing is, candybar phones have the antennas as far away from the head as possible to reduce the SAR values; that means the antennas are up against the hand (which has a higher SAR limit than your head as I remember). One of the PhDs who commented on the issue noted this.

Multiple antenna phones tend to only receive on multiple antennas, so more antennas do not necessarily help with these issues for uplink degradation.

(speaking personally, obviously)

Pretty sure some site (anandtech?) noted wifi reception improved when you held the phone...

But yes, it was WiFi smog. I heard the full detail and the number of base stations in the room was accurate (they could even identify how many were MiFi's by the MAC address prefixes). The "solution" (apart from shaming people into turning points off) was kinda sweet too, involving taking all the room's official APs offline and reconfiguring them at opposite ends of the wifi spectrum, then bringing up the demo AP in the middle immediately before use, and before any clients had a chance to associate with the offical AP network.

I recall that at the time, some people commented that Google had the same issue with their demos at the Google IO conference earlier that year. Really, MiFi's and similar need to look at the surrounding wifi environment and dynamically reduce their TX power if it's keynote-busy. WiFi was just never designed to work like that.

As to why the 3GS worked better then the 4, my guess is the 3GS was on 11g and maybe that deals with insane amounts of interference better than 11n? Just a guess though, WiFi has never behaved as well as the label says it should

Anyone know if AT&T keeps published information on what frequencies they use in different parts of the country? In Portland, Seattle and Redmond, I can't replicate the massive speed drop by holding the phone in my left hand like I could down in Austin. As far as bars, I only managed to drop it from 5 to 4 once in Portland, nowhere near the 5-1 I could do 2 blocks from a tower in Austin.

Also not seeing any fast HSUPA uplink speeds in these areas compared to Austin, I wonder if somehow that has anything to do with it. I'm just more confused now.

Consumer Reports' test involved a signal generator in a Faraday cage, and they claim that they tested a lot of different frequencies. I don't have a subscription, so the full article, assuming that there is one with more detail than the publicly accessible article and video, might contain information about frequencies. If anyone here has a CR subscription, maybe you could check?

Well, guess we shall see what Apple says Friday.

Well my iPhone4 just arrived.

Basically here at home if I have it in my hand I loose 3G. Can't say I get anything but a good 3G signal here, I can basically see the mast on top of a tower block close by.

It's funny as Nicola got one the other week and hers doesn't seem to be suffering too much. I suppose I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see what is actually being done about it.

Cheers

Cris.

How far away is the tower block and how high up is it? Given the vertical radiation patterns of these aerials, it's quite possible your phone's not associated with that mast.

If they say anything that isn't in keeping with the rest of their public messages I'll be amazed. I have no doubt they'll deny everything or try to spin it somehow.

By the way, if I hear one more time the phrase "the iPhone 4 actually has better reception than previous iPhones" I'm going to scream. Yes, it does, but THAT ISN'T THE F'ING POINT! Both things can be true: it gets great reception, AND it has reception problems when held in a certain place. I've heard this statement a dozen times and it's driving me nuts.

I highly doubt they would be organizing a full press event with invites for various organizations to come to their campus to just say "Nothing is wrong". Apple has to get out in front of this issue fast with all the coverage (including Letterman making a top 10 joke of it). This is the first time I can think of that Apple is holding an event like this outside of announcing a new product or software update. It will be a damage control event for sure, but with actual action in some meaningful way. At a minimum, I'm expecting free bumper cases.

Why do I say this? Close to 10 years of being an Apple customer has taught me that even when they do slip up, they act to fix the problems even if they initially deny them. I don't see that changing now.

I will say though if their solution is free bumper cases, I'll probably take the phone back. As much as I like the device overall, I keep going back to the 911 call where the operator couldn't hear my friend making the call. I simply cannot support the product with my money with such a serious design flaw, and the bumper for me just swaps that issue for others. Much like I refused to pay for the defective Vista OS, or will refuse to buy another 360 if my current one fails, I'll refuse to keep this generation of iPhone until the flaw is fixed. At least that means I'll only have to wait another year for a new phone, instead of 3 for a new OS, or 5 for a new design of a console

4.0.1.

Bigger bars!

Yea, bigger bars but less of them!!!

When I first started hearing of the reception issues I just thought to myself it's just hype from all the Apple haters out there, but it is going to be a serious problem for me I think. I've made a couple of calls from my office today, all of which had breaks up but no drop outs. I can't remember ever having connection issues from this seat with the 3G in the past.

On the positive side what an amazing device, it feels so good in my hand. If you told me it was made of solid glass and runs on magic I think I'd believe you

Cheers

Cris.

Trust me I know it is, I fitted the telemetry lines to it. It's line of sight to my house, the only other O2 masts are on the other side of the valley.

Cheers

Cris.

You have to install iPhone updates through a computer?

Yes.

You mean when touching the spot or when not touching the spot ?

If not touching the spot then you almost certainly have an issue not connected with the touch-the-spot reception issue. There are quite a few people on the O2 forum with general reception issues that seem to get resolved by a replacement SIM or phone (usually the SIM it appears).

Everything I've seen confirms to me that the iPhone 4 has much better reception than the 3G normally when not touching the spot, particularly in dodgy signal areas.

Not for you since you have first hand experience of where the tower is but Ofcoms tower site finder tool may be useful. The interface is clunky and annoying to use but you can find out where the towers are near you, who runs them, what frequency and power.

The changes in 4.0.1 are only listed as "Improves the formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display". What is interesting is that the baseband firmware hasn't changed at all. The only difference is the application side.

The iPad got a small upgrade from 3.2 to 3.2.1 today as well but nothing is listed regarding the 3G radio. No changes for the original iPhone.

That's the small down side. The up side is that Apple release updates and that everyone with an iPhone can download and install them.

The biggest downside is that none of the updates ever fix the design issues with the base apps.

It really is about time Apple started using a delta patch system of some sort, rather than the whole image approach. It would appear that 4.0.1 is a crazy 579MB download !

They did have patches right at the start. You could go from 1.0.0 to 1.0.1 to 1.0.2 via patches or via the full restore images.

The delta patches also failed pretty badly at times, especially when applied to a jailbroken phone. With how popular the iPhone is, it's probably cheaper for Apple to pay slightly higher bandwidth costs vs the support costs of the delta method. On the downside, it means people stuck with satellite Internet usually can't get the patches due to daily caps of 500mb on some of the higher end plans.