iPhone 4S: Antennagate, check! Brain damage, check!

iFixed nothing

    Apple claims that the iPhone 4S features a new antenna design, intended to prevent any risk of 'Antennagate' reoccurring. But did they really fix or innovate anything? Let's start with fixing things. In the mockup on the right you can see that by "not holding it right" you are shorting 3 of iPhone 4S's antennas and you will be jamming the forth one once the phone touches your ear.

   The 4S's new dual antennas can automatically switch when sending and receiving information, a trick Apple claims is "a first" for a mobile phone.

    We won't go into explaining the dangers of SAR and why most manufacturers place the antenna on the bottom of the phone, away from your brain. You should know though that at any given time the best working antenna on iPhone 4S will be the one on top since it's the only one not shorted, it's the one the device will choose for best signal. It's right there next to your gray matter where most of the SAR radiation will dissipate.

   Frølund Pedersen, professor at Aalborg University's Institute for Electronic Systems in Denmark and one of the big names involved in the events of Antennagate last time around, feels that Apple's latest iPhone might be treading on toes stems from patents he and his associates apparently sold to Samsung some years earlier.

At the iPhone 4S launch, CEO Tim C(r)ook and co were quoted as saying,

“Improving on the innovative stainless steel external, dual-antenna design of iPhone 4, iPhone 4S is the first phone to intelligently switch between two antennas to send and receive.”

Pedersen disagrees, primarily with the fact that Apple dubbed this an 'innovation',

"When Apple says that it is new, it’s not true. It has been in use for very long. For example in the DECT cordless phones. Both in these and in some other phones“

Apple lies again, probably bribed Consumer Reports

      In an unprecedented turn of events Consumer Reports came back on on their initial decision of not recommending an iPhone, recommending it but with the use of a bumper. How much Apple paid for that is probably a thing we'll never find out.

        It has already been reported that not even the bumper case can alleviate the reception issue! Check the video below and notice how iPhone 4 loses all it's bars even with the "magical" bumper case on. Even if the bumper would provide a fix, the fact that it's not built in is completely wrong!

Apple: now deleting iPhone 4 bug/issue threads, your thoughts to follow

     If you were looking for a message thread on Apple's support forums pointing to Consumer Reports' article 'not recommending' the iPhone 4, it's not there any more. Apple's support forum moderators deleted the thread. Bing cached it.

    If it happened once, maybe you'd say it was a glitch. But what if it happened twice? Three times? Four times, five, six?

    I'm not prone to hysterics or a subscriber to conspiracy theories, but it's fairly hard to imagine any good way to interpret this. Every post that I saw listed in a Google search of Apple's discussion boards lead to the same result: "Error: you do not have permission to view the requested forum or category."

Apple promisses to fix antenna issue, prepare your anti-rad suits!

      "Readers report that Apple's tech support forums originally confirmed that a iOS 4.0.1 software fix addressing the issue would ship early next week (as early as Monday), before the comments were subsequently taken down along with all the other related discussion about the matter.

      The fix is expected to address a issue in iOS 4 related to radio frequency calibration of the baseband. Readers who saw the original forum discussions say that the issue is believed to occur when switching frequencies; because the lag is allegedly not calibrated correctly, it results in the device reporting "no service" rather than switching to the frequency with the best signal to noise ratio.

      iOS 4 introduced some enhancements to how the baseband selects which frequencies to use, so it makes sense that the error may have crept into those changes. Additionally, this explains why iOS 4 has also caused similar problems for iPhone 3GS users."

Bright spots, dead pixels, sim failures, inverted volume buttons and more...

      Just enriching our database with news of what might be the worst launch of a device in history. Not only in Apple's history but in the history of any electronic gadget ever made. If you're curious about the "and more" part I advise you to check some of the previous posts, as well as the feature check of iPhone 4 - obviously the 100 promised features where yet another shameless lie. So let's go!

Bright spots and dead pixels

        I warned you guys about this one in my article "The iPhone 4 screen - a multimedia flop?" a month before the release of this "magical" device. 

       Notice in these two pictures, firstly the background so you don't think it's a reflection and then the bright constellation - it consists out of the light leaking from the back panel through the dead pixels.

      Apple has pushed TFT technology too far, hence the bright spots as the screen isn't lit uniformly and the dead pixels generated by both capacitative technology and miniaturization required to double the resolution. If they hadn't been so cheap, Super AMOL
ED would have been the perfect answer. One single layer, instead of a sandwich that traps various chemical substances (yellow spots) and burns 50-60% more power.

Inverted volume buttons

    I'm quite sure somebody at Foxconn is having a healthy laugh right now. It looks like the volume buttons on some units have been "accidentally" swapped.

Apple disappoints again: grave signal issues in iPhone 4!

    This is a reader video found on Macrumors forums illustrating something weird. When the guy holds the iPhone in his hands, touching the outside antenna band in two places, he drops reception. Placing the phone down gets him 4 bars.

   We're not sure if he's doing something particularly weird, like holding the metal antenna in such a way that it's shorting out. But it is strange. Or, it could be just a bug in the software, showing no bars and no reception even when you do have reception. But, he does hold the phone with the glass, and it doesn't have this reception issue.

If you've got an iPhone 4, we'd like to have you test this out too, and contribute to YOUR iPhone 4 review. Test holding it in various ways, like one finger on the glass and one on the metal, or any combination that you think might produce different results. Let us know what you find.

Update: Make sure to test this while you're IN a call too, to see if the call drops. This way we can determine if it's just displaying bars incorrectly, or if it really does impact your reception.

iPad banned from several American universities over security concerns

   Three high-profile American universities, Cornell University, Princeton University, and George Washington University, have banned the iPad from their campuses. They call the device a “security risk”. So much for the iPad being the darling of higher education - not like it had real productivity an office features in the first place anyway.

     The story, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, notes that the iPad is incompatible with certain security features of Cornell’s and GWU’s wireless network, something that’s not the case when you’re dealing with “regular” laptops and netbooks running full operating systems in Windows or Linux and the more advanced smartphone OSes like Symbian, Android or Maemo/MeeGo.

       It isn’t a case of these universities “hating” the iPad, or unfairly singling it out, it’s just that it’s not compatible. Please put down your pitchforks, Apple fans. Apple will probably release a fix for the iPad and the universities will make sure it works with their networks as soon as possible, maybe even in time for the beginning of the fall semester. These things—apple releasing software updates, restructuring a large network—take quite a bit of time.

       It’s not the first time that Apple products have had a hard time on college campuses. When the iPhone was first released, in 2007, Duke University first complained about security issues.The culprit, it seems, is the aluminum housing which was also present on the first iPhone - however Apple seems to have long forgotten that and placed an even larger interference dish on the iPad.

Via: WSJ