Monthly Archives: July 2010

AT&T & iPhone 4: Fewer bars in fewer places

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Upon the beaconing of our tech god Steve Jobs some (about 2 Million) people went out and stood in line to get the new must have gadget from the Apple.  It is the iPhone 4 the 4th generation of Apple’s entry into the smartphone arena and among all the new features it has what is quite possibly the best screen on a phone at the moment but it is only somewhat better than the AMOLED screens in some of the newest phones on the market like the Sprint HTC EVO 4g, HTC DROID Incredible, and the HTC Google Nexus One. Apple calls it the Retina Display and claims that the pixel dimension of the display is so high that it is more than the eye can see.  Steve Jobs says “It turns out there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch, that when you hold something around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels,” the iPhone 4 is at 326PPI,however Raymond Soneria of Display Mate a company that has spent years calibrating displays disagrees a more accurate “retina display” would have a pixel resolution of 477 pixels per inch at 12 inches” (Wired.com) to read more go to the wired magazine article http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/iphone-4-retina-2/ .

The newest feature of iPhone 4 is  the front facing camera and the chat program FaceTime however to initiate FaceTime you first need to call the iPhone 4 user  and be on a Wi-Fi network  because the video chatting works over Wi-Fi only for now  coming to 3g sometime later on. You must be on the cellular network to initiate the call in the first place, weird huh and it is ONLY iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 which limits the number of people you can FaceTime with, making this feature a cool thing you can’t really use.  Now the real revolutionary feature the antenna design which consists of 3 Stainless steel   bands which make up the thickness of the phone the top left antenna being the 3G GPS antenna the top right being the Wi-Fi Bluetooth and the bottom being the GSM cell phone antenna 

apple claims it gives you the best coverage of any iPhone so far. Or so they thought as soon as the iPhone 4 started to hit the streets there were reports of being able to short out the 3G and cellular antenna by holding the phone in their left hand making the phone lose service completely, and there are numerous videos of people demoing this and being able to do it on command.  A friend of mine let me see his new toy I was personally able to replicate the problem without any difficulty at all on command multiple times so I can say it is a problem.  What is more ludicrous is Apple’s initial response to the problem “Your holding it wrong”  I’m not kidding  and apple advised their Apple Care support team to NOT give out free Bumper cases (the Apple frame case) which will remedy the problem . Why because doing that admits we screwed up which they did admit last Friday saying that “Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”  So what Apple is saying your iPhone has been lying to you the WHOLE TIME!!!!! ‘ so when the iPhone says it has  5 bars full signal  it is really 2 – 3 bars  add this to the absolutely horrid state of AT&T’s network  all one can say it WTF Apple and AT&T?  Read the whole press release at http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/07/02appleletter.html .

You might call me anti- Apple but I am not I proudly own and love my MacBook (fall 2007 black polycarbonate) I do own and use a Verizon Wireless Rim BlackBerry Curve 8330 and have no intentions of buying an iPhone or moving to AT&T but if Apple puts the A4 chipset and retina display in the next generation iPod Touch you call stand in line behind me.

image source  http://live.gdgt.com/2010/06/07/live-wwdc-2010-keynote-coverage/#10-35-26-am