In Apple’s Rush to Make Money on the iPhone4- What About the Phone?

I want a new iPhone 4, but can I stand to hold it a certain way as Steve Jobs suggests to avoid "dropped calls"?  Apple’s antenna on the iPhone4 is obviously a poor design. The only mitigation may be to wear gloves or purchase the optional rubber bumper ring (which may actually be the fix in disguise). Clearly, phone calls take a back seat in the design priority to the more hip “apps” and web usage.  What most people don’t realize is these services actually need much less signal power to operate effectively. They can operate in weaker signal conditions than plane old phone calls. The reason is digital signal processing. 

Taken at the most basic level it’s akin to saying the same thing over and over, averaging the result and presenting the averaged result to the user.  For example, think of a number, say 5. In a phone call you would say “5”. The person on the other end might say, “I didn’t get that would you please repeat the number”. Then you get it.  With digital data in today’s cell phones, the system may actually say, “please repeat that 1000 times” and then average the answer. It works great for messages because they aren’t conveyed in real time and delays are accepted.  All cell phones are data interfaces first and phones second. The iPhone should have been named the iData.  Phone service was obviously not the priority.

As an electrical engineer and antenna designer I can say for sure that using a bare metal rim around the phone as the antenna will have profound sensitivity to how the user holds the device and how and where bare fingers come in contact with the antenna.  I’ve always been amazed that cell phones work at all given the way they are used. People expect them to work regardless of how they held, where they happen to be- while riding inside a metal cage (car, plane, etc) and even in tunnels.  We’ve all become accustomed to walking around the house to find a good signal in places where the service is on the edge of failure.

The telecomm industry knows that users expect high quality service and “drop free” operation. They try to account for this wide variability of user environment by providing very large margins of signal power needed to maintain a good connection. They’ve done amazing advances in performance with sophisticated digital signal processing algorithms and modulation schemes that minimize the impact of weak signal conditions, but user volume has continued to far exceed the cell phone network capacity. Until the telecomm industry increases the number of towers, upgrades the existing towers, and deploys a 4G+ network with capacity margin, people will rant about poor performance and walk around the house looking for a good signal- we’re humans- we adapt.