Apple's ludicrous iPhone 4 apology

By Richi Jennings. July 2, 2010.

Sooo, Apple has issued a statement about the iPhone 4 reception issues and the problems caused by touching the antenna. About time. As Jonny says, it's all the fault of a bug in the code that displays the signal bars.

What a load of old garbage.

The upcoming firmware patch will make the bars display differently. Perhaps in a way more consistent with the way other phones do it.

The patch will not fix the actual problem. It should be clear to anyone who has a little understanding of RF, that allowing users to touch an antenna in such a way as to change its impedance will have a significant effect on signal strength and quality -- possibly improving it, but usually making it worse.

Yes, holding older iPhones also caused reduced signal, but to nowhere near this extent. The more scientific tests -- such as those performed by Brian Klug and Anand Lal Shimpi -- show that actual signal strength as measured by the UMTS hardware is reduced by 10 or 20 dB more on an iPhone 4 than on an iPhone 3G.

Don't forget, this is a logarithmic scale: a 10 dB reduction is a 90% loss of signal. 20 dB is a 99% loss: basically catastrophic, unless you're really close to the cell tower and not in an environment with too much RF noise.

The iPhone 4 antenna design is certainly innovative, but as I said last week, those of us with a little understanding of RF knew that a bare metal antenna was going to be trouble, as soon as we saw the pre-production unit lost in a bar. The natural assumption was that Apple would cover it with a transparent film; I can only speculate as to why they didn't.

Still, from early indications, it looks like the Apple fanbois are lapping up the explanation. The famous reality distortion field strikes again: it's not a design flaw, just a firmware bug.

Yeah, right.

 
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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: TLV@richij.com.

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