So we have now had the press conference about the iPhone 4 aerial problems and the software update. Does this mean the problem is fixed?
Well you asking the wrong person, since I don’t have one!
However a friend of mine (the one having the problems I mentioned here) didn’t think it had made much difference. He had only just installed it, so maybe it is a little early to say for sure.
So the press conference?
Yes, all phones have this problem to a degree. Is the iPhone any worse than other phone in this respect? Maybe, maybe not. I suspect it is towards the worse end due to the fact the aerial is exposed.
But I have no reason to doubt the figures that Apple gives in the press conference for customer satisfaction and return rates. It seems to be a very small percentage of people having this problem. And as normal with an Apple product the press reports of the problem are much exaggerated. The reason for this I think is that it is Apple. Apple fanboys love there Apple ‘stuff’ and so when it doesn’t work quite as expected we (yes I’m one I admit) do get more upset than we should. And again being Apple, if there is even a tiny stumble from them, everyone else (the non-fanboys) can’t wait to attack Apple!
Interesting however that the iPhone 4 drops (slightly) more calls than iPhone 3GS.
And so the solution is to use a case. A free case from Apple. A simple solution? Yes
And that fact that this is up till the 30th September, again interesting. Why this deadline?
I think that Apple have another software fix in mind and are testing this now. They can’t have new hardware ready for then
Now I’ve got that out of the way, here is a predication. Not matter if the problem is real or not, the next generation of the iPhone hardware will not have this type of aerial.
It is been just to bad in terms of bad press for Apple they won’t stick with it. We will see a different looking iPhone 5 (or HD or 4G, whatever it will be called)
So I’m going to make propose an idea here, but before I do I have to say I’m not an aerial designer or electronics engineer. I do however have a little knowledge here. So my idea…
We know the iPhone 4 has a glass case both front and back and we know that normal glass is pretty transparent to microwaves. It could be that the aluminium based glass that we know the iPhone 4 is built from (transparent aluminium!) isn’t so transparent. If we say for the moment that it is, we could have the aerial inside the phone but still ‘on display’ as it where. But I’m not going to stop there!
We also know that Apple has a patent for using solar cells to recharge portable devices, so if they use the back of the phone for this (okay the patent is for the front) we then have a ready made grid of wires inside the phone. These wires would be carrying the voltage from the sola cells, but there is no reason why you can’t have a signal going through these wires as well. The power is DC and the signal is AC, the two can be carried down the same cable and be split. I don’t know if it would be easy at microwave frequencies but it’s easy at high RF frequencies (800 to 900 Mhz). So what does this mean?
The next generation of iPhone could have a large ‘conformal aerial’ mixed in with the solar cells. This would probably be very good for reception and be insanely cool to us Geeks (conformal aerials are used for radar in the B2 sprit ‘stealth bomber’). It’s probably also true to say it would be very expensive to design, but this is Apple we are talking about!
Jul
17
2010
