Most people now know that when using a mobile device, moving the antenna just several feet can sometimes change signal reception. Most people may not know that physical objects such as hands can interfere with signal reception.
It appears Apple's new iPhone 4 may suffer from that problem. Apparently, the iPhone 4 signal strength drops when a user grips the phone by the metal antenna band. Gizmodo has over a dozen videos of users showing off this problem.
When held in the left hand with our fingers touching the metal band, the bars representing signal strength dropped from 5 to 1 in less than a minute.
The problem appears to involve finger-contact on certain parts of the metal band. When the phone is switched to the right hand, which put our fingers in different position, the signal strength remained the same. So for many people, user experience may depend on whether they are left-handed or right-handed.
Right-handed people are going to tend to hold the device in the left hand, and navigate with the fingers of the right hand. That means most people are going to be prone to block the signal themselves, simply based on which hand they are using to hold the device.
And you might have thought mobile phone design was easy!
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Right-Handed Users May Have Signal Reception Problems on iPhone 4
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iphone 4
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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