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robdverity 07/20/2010 09:26 PM Report
Exposing my dinosaur roots here. A culture, society lacking intellectually worthy discourse should not be encouraged, nor enhanced with abilities to expose such lack. A la the old saw, if you're stupid don't open your mouth and remove all doubt. Iphones1,2,3,4,..... leave precious little room and compounded with pics for further proof. . . . like, "and what color underwear today little lady?"
Maybe 10 - 20 yrs we'll have a workable decorum for their use; but I doubt it.
makelvin 07/19/2010 04:11 PM Report
Charlie,
I like to clarify the fact that Apple had never claimed that they had a software fix for the antenna reception issue; but rather they are simply providing a software patch to more accurately displace the signal strength the phone is receiving. The problem with the old display algorithm is that it is displaying stronger signal than it should even when it is weak. As a result, the signal attenuation by touching the lower left corner of the phone got exagerated. For example, from five bars to 1 bar instead of the actual reality of signal only get attenuated by 1 or 2 bars.
Apple is trying to show that all cell phones attenuate their signal when you hold the phone a certain way and that their iPhone 4's attenuation is in line with those other phones. I believe Steve Jobs' claims was mostly true. Anytime when someone try to shield the antenna with material that can absorb the RF waves will clearly attenuate the signal. Human body contains mostly water and water absorbs RF waves. This should be abvious to anyone and really does not require a lot of further explanations.
The thing that is unique to Apple's iPhone 4 is that fact the the lower left corner of the iPhone has a small gap that separates two complete different antennas. For people who are not familar with antenna design, most antennas are designed to a certain range of resonant frequencies. This means that these antennas will pick up RF frequencies more efficiently within their designed resonances than RF frequencies outside. The two antennas on the iPhone 4 are designed with different resonant RF frequencies and that is why there are two different antennas. When someone put something conductive that bridges across the antennas, the resonant characteristics of the two antennas can drastically changed to other frequencies. Therefore neither antennas are now efficiently picking up their original designed frequencies and resulted in the signal attenuation. This form of signal attenuation I believe is very unique to the iPhone 4 compared to the other cell phones.
To make matter even more complicated is that the conductivity of the human skin varies a lot from person to person as well as possibly varies within the same person at different time of day due to their water content level. A person with really dry hand does not provide a good enough contact to be able to bridge the two antennas together compared to a person with really moist hand. This is the reason why people have such varying reports about the antenna problem they personally experience. It is hard for me to imagine the person or persons originally designed the iPhone 4's antennas did not know of such issues from the beginning. My assumption is that the designer did an engineering trade-off where the signal attenuation due to touching the spot is an acceptable comprimise compared to the signal gain in general overall by completely exposing the antennas.
In my opinion, this really is a very minor issue since that location is rather easy to avoid. For the right handed users, it almost seem like you have to go out of your way to touch the spot. As for the left handed users, I can see it might pose more of a problem as you have to make sure your palm does not touch that spot; but then again it only affects people with moist hand and for those people, a bumper will clearly fix that issue completely. As for a real fix for the future iPhone, all you need is to either move the gap to the bottom of the phone so that it will not be anywhere on the left or the right side where people can accidently touch or they can spray a thin clear dielectric coating on the outside of the antennas before they assemble them together.
I think the reason why this whole thing is so blown out of proportion is that RF design is fairly complicated and is usually very difficult to explain to the layman. A lot of people tend to treat the whole area of RF as black magic. I hope I have provided enough information to help explain some of the mysteries. I really do enjoy your show.
REMant 07/19/2010 01:52 PM Report
Jobs is certainly an ass, and so are the ppl who have made a fetish of his products, but a recent piece that said he was simply carried away with the elegance of the idea was probably right. I have never owned an Apple product, but I admire what they try to do, even if it is always a little pretentious, somewhat like the Germans who designed the AA on the Bismarck.