On Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:19:06 -0500, tom wrote:

On 7/12/2010 8:30 PM, Richard Clark wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/te...apple.html?hpw

"Consumer Reports, America’s trusted source of product reviews, said
it would not recommend the iPhone 4 because of a hardware flaw with
its antenna that sometimes resulted in dropped calls.

"... its antenna, which is built into a steel band that encases the
phone.

"After users reported problems with signal strength and dropped calls
when they touched the lower-left portion of the phone, however, Apple
suggested that consumers hold the phone differently or use one of many
bumpers to insulate the antenna. It also said that all phones suffered
from similar problems when they were cradled a certain way.

"These comments were widely laughed at in gadget blogs."

Just thought I would submit this to the Laughing Academy.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

I can't tell from your comments if you think there is a problem with the
phone or Consumer Reports.

Hi Tom,

By any account, there's a problem. Now, as the iPhone has had
demonstrable connection issues in the past, it was blamed on AT&T who
bore the brunt of that criticism.

Reports long following this past connection problem has borne out that
AT&T had adequate 3G capacity, and AT&T chose to take the bullet for
their customer (Apple, if anyone has lost track) who had a marginal
design in their protocol stack (poor through-put and high retry
traffic).

From what I've heard there are repeatable problems, but I've heard no
coherent explanation of what might be occurring.

The NYT article's symptomology bears out across many reports from a
variety of sources.

The thing that seems to be consistent is that left handed users have
more reported problems than right handed users.

That would be apocryphal, at best.

The short answer is that fashion trumps technology. The rising trend
of using the iPhone as an eReader flies in the face of what was
formerly a nebbish activity. Fashion forced the turnaround, not the
technology (I've been reading books on my Palm Pilot for 6 years - I
have not suddenly become an über-hip literary savant overnight by
virtue of that trend as anyone here will quickly testify.)

The only thing that remains a mystery, for me if for no one else here,
is the literal specification of the antenna. Google (gasp) fails me.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC