It’s always nice to see people who actually know what they’re talking about weighing in. Richard Gaywood has a Ph.D. in wireless network planning techniques (who knew that even existed) and has done some thinking in his blog. Based on his brief testing, it looks like the dropped bars are only really an issue in places where you already have crappy signal quality, but even under good connections you may hit some data upload slowdown.
Is it fixable? Here’s what Gaywood says:
It might (might) be fixable in software. People are talking about things like calibration faults in the signal strength meter, or some sort of dynamic frequency allocation that doesn’t square with any bit of the GSM spec I’ve ever been exposed too. I’m uncertain about this. It doesn’t feel like a software fault to me.
But I think [that] is unlikely. I think there’s some deeper problem here, and I await Apple’s formal response to the issue with interest.
Apple really needs to get on to putting out some fires on this issue, they’re being slaughtered on the blogs.
UPDATE: Anandtech mapped the signal strength that the iPhone 4 outputs, and compared how handling it different ways drops the connection, and compared that to the same data from the 3GS and Nexus One. What they found is that the iPhone 4 loses far more of its signal than the other phones, but manages to maintain calls even at lower levels. So in some ways it’s an improvement. Interesting reading.
[via MacRumors]
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I’m beginning to wonder if Apple is going to step forward. Then I think…Why would they, their still sold out and fast approaching 2M sold units.
My point exactly. If this is such a huge problem, why are people still lining up to buy them? I don’t understand it.
They are lining up because they don’t know any better. Do you really believe these people go to blog sites? Sure some percentage do, but how many are technical enough to understand the situation. This is like the iPad. Why is that thing popular? Tablet PC’s have been around for some time now. It’s because Apple is a brilliant marketing machine. The iPad offers nothing above a Netbook PC other than screen size. Yet people line up for the Gucci like iPad because they think it makes them special. When the web doesn’t work because they don’t have flash, they blame everybody but Apple.
This is the Apple cult and why people are still lining up for defective product. (FYI- I wrote this on my iPhone 3GS connected to my Win Network that has one Mac and multiple Win XP and Win 7 machines…no iPad yet)