iPhone 4 Reception Problems? Stop Holding It The Wrong Way, Apple Says

Apple has acknowledged and responded to the reception problems people are having with their new iPhone 4, which seem to happen based on the way the phone is being held.

The advice? Stop holding the phone the wrong way.

Apple sent Engadget the following statement: "Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases."

Steve Jobs Responds To iPhone 4 Reception Problems: Stop Holding It The Wrong Way!

Marketing in a Broadband Context

The Future of Marketing in a Broadband Culture (FoDM Conference London)

You might be able to pull some nuggets from this presentation.

Vote: Do You Have Signal Strength Issues on Your iPhone 4?

http://polldaddy.com/poll/3387884/

And don't forget to try it using both hands, left and right. You should get different results.

Gap Between Revenue and Bandwidth is The Heart of the Matter

One doesn't have to love, or even like, any of the communication providers out there to acknowledge that there is a key business problem here that directly affects any user's ability to get the most out of their communication spending and experience.

The global voice market is declining, first on the fixed line networks and now starting on the mobile networks as well. You don't have to care about that. But if you want better services, you have to acknowledge that if current revenue gets cut in half, then perhaps to a third, the people who run networks will have a hard time investing in better networks. This is not a matter of sentiment but of economics.

Everybody knows that the replacement revenues will have to come from the broadband, video, content mobile, data and commerce services realms. So the practical issue providers have is to scale the new revenues at least up to the point where voice revenue is now. Along the way service providers will have to cut costs as well, but the key issue is new revenues.

And the problem there on the bandwidth services front is that across all networks, revenue does not scale linearly with bandwidth supplied. Since nobody seems to think that can be changed too much, the burden of growth will come on the new applications and services fronts.

That means most issues related to terms of service or price of service are simply efforts to better match cost and revenue for the access part of the business. Nobody thinks the whole problem can be fixed that way, but it is part of the solution, in addition to deploying more-efficient networks and creating new services that people are comfortable paying for.

You don't have to love or like any particular service provider to hope service providers can figure this out. Unless of course you have a way of creating your own services.

Is the Apple 4 Steel Band Antenna the Problem, or Something Else?

Users are reporting problems with signal reception when the Apple iPhone 4 is held in the left hand, as opposed to the right. But the earlier iPhone 3 also had reception issues, leading one to wonder whether it is a physical issue or a software issue.

It is starting to appear as though every new smartphone has some issues, despite the strengths. HTC Evo users will tell you that despite the bigger battery and beautiful screen, battery life is poor. Poor as in, if you do a lot of web operations, you might have to charge it more than once a day. Of course, iPhone 3 users probably would agree that heavy web use kills battery life as well.

Nobody Likes ETFs, But Nobody Wants to Pay Full Retail, Either

Consumers don't like early termination fees. But neither do they like paying full price. A new Apple iPhone 4 with 32 GBytes of memory can be purchased now for $299 with a two-year contract, or at full retail for $699, without a contract.

Which option do you suspect most people will choose? If you want to know why the hated ETFs exist, it is the subsidy.

AT&T’s ETF on a smartphone like the iPhone is $325, up from $175 in May. Why? Some will carrier greed. But under the old pricing rules, a consumer could buy a phone for $99 on contract, instead of $600. Then the consumer could break the contract, pay the $175 fee, getting the device, without a contract commitment, for $274.

The customer then could sell the device on eBay or simply sign up for service with no contract.

Nobody likes contracts or ETFs. But nobody wants to pay full retail, either.

Digital Society � Blog Archive � Cellular Oligopoly is a Dirty Word

Right-Handed Users May Have Signal Reception Problems on iPhone 4

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!