iPhone 4 antenna issues
I’ve been getting extremely frustrated lately with all the coverage of the iPhone 4’s antenna issues. Doesn’t matter where you get your news from, it’ll be skewed from various perspectives. Anyone who doesn’t know anything about antennas is getting heavily biased information, even from the supposedly impartial BBC.
The fact is as Steve Jobs said in his press conference the other day, the number of people experiencing any problems with signal is shockingly small given the way it’s all been blown out of proportion. I don’t know anyone who’s experienced any issues with theirs, and I myself have only had a single dropped call, and that was in my back lounge where my old phone couldn’t get any signal at all.
The important point to take away is that ALL phones (or anything with an antenna – radios, walkie-talkies, laptops, pdas) experience signal attenuation when you introduce a EM absorbing object between them and the transmission source. In this case, that object is the bag of water that is your hand. Your body is nearly two thirds water. Water absorbs EM. How do you think your microwave works? Look it up.
In this case, there’s the additional issue of left handers covering the bottom left antenna gap with their palm. This is a design flaw. The antenna should probably be anodised or something – having an exposed transmissive surface that is going to be frequently in contact with a conductive object is silly. However, again, I’ve not had a problem with this. I’m generally speaking ambidextrous, but depending on the task I usually use one hand more than the other. For phone calls, I use my left hand, but I hold the phone loosely and my palm doesn’t even touch the antenna. I’ve done this for years - it’s not a case of trying to make my iPhone 4 work - it’s a case of trying not to irradiate my hand any more than is strictly necessary. It’s not hard, and I certainly don’t have to put my hand in any unusual positions.
Then there’s the complete twits trying to get some publicity out of it – that US senator for example. There’s Consumer Reports saying Apple should give away free cases, which they do, and then refusing to recommend what they admit is the best smartphone on the market anyway, just out of spite. There’s RIM and Nokia having their own individual hissy fits because it was their phones used as examples in the press conference to show that all phones suffer attenuation when you hold them.
Then, to top it all, I’ve got the brainless morons who, upon seeing my phone, ask me to do the “death grip”. Even if I could get it to work, which I can’t, why would I? Shut up. The lot of you. There is a positive note though, for each idiot who believes all this crap and decides not to buy an iPhone 4, is one less person with the same phone as me. This I like.
I’ve decided, given how annoyed I get with idiot drivers, and stupid journalists asking stupid questions, that from now on I’m going to make a conscious effort to be more like Oz from Buffy. Chilled.
