Tag Archives | Apple. iPhone

iPhone 4: The Fix is In(side)?

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 15, 2010 at 11:38 am

TheStreet.com’s Scott Moritz is reporting that analyst Ashok Kumar has learned that Apple has figured out how to resolve the iPhone 4’s lower-left-hand-corner reception glitch. The fix supposedly involves an internal component that will insulate the antenna from interference. Kumar also told MSNBC’s Wilson Rothman that it might be retroactively applicable to iPhone 4s that have already been sold, via a service job akin to replacing the battery.

I’m not assuming that the report is true–the Mortiz/Kumar team has a track record that’s, um, spotty, very spotty. But if Apple can greatly reduce or eliminate the problem, it’s surely in its best interest to do so. And it seems unlikely that it would invite journalists to its headquarters if its gameplan was mostly to argue there isn’t a real problem here.

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The iPhone 4's Crippling/Non-Crippling Problem/Non-Problem

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 13, 2010 at 3:58 pm

Engadget’s Nilay Patel surveyed Engadget contributors and some other folks (including me) about the iPhone 4 and whether they’ve encountered the grip of death issue. The bottom line is…there is no bottom line! Some people have detected no problem whatsoever and some (like me) have seen it in certain circumstances. Nobody finds it a gotcha so enormous as to render the phone useless.

Even if Nilay’s story doesn’t clear things up, it’s good reading.

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The iPhone 4 Grip of Death: I'm a Believer

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 13, 2010 at 9:34 am

It took three weeks of real-world use before I figured it out. But I’m finally convinced that the iPhone 4’s antenna problem is real, that it’s affecting my phone in certain situations, and that there’s no scenario in which Apple is done responding to this issue.

I spent yesterday at the MobileBeat 2010 conference at San Francisco’s Palace hotel. The hotel is in the South of Market neighborhood, where making phone calls on an iPhone over AT&T can be an iffy proposition in the best of circumstances. And over the course of the day, I ducked out of the conference several times to make important calls.

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Consumer Reports Can't Recommend the iPhone 4

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 12, 2010 at 8:57 am

Consumer Reports thinks that the iPhone 4 has the sharpest display and best camera it’s ever seen in a smartphone. It’s impressed by the phone’s battery life, and likes the front-facing camera and gyroscope. But CR doesn’t recommend Apple’s newest phone–because it says that that its testing proves that the 4 can indeed suffer from degraded reception if you touch the lower left-hand corner. In areas with weak AT&T coverage, in fact, touching the phone can cause it to lose signal altogether.

CR’s refusal to recommend the iPhone 4 represents something of a turnaround from its initial impressions: At first, it said that the reception issues weren’t unique and might not be a major problem. Now they’re serious enough to outweigh the numerous things the publication likes about the phone. Which leaves me wondering whether Apple will be forced to reengineer this phone or otherwise address concerns before the next-generation iPhone shows up in a year or so.

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The Best Mobile Version of YouTube is Now YouTube, Not an App

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 7, 2010 at 1:11 pm

YouTube is launching a new version of its mobile site today for HTML5-capable smartphones such as the iPhone and Android handsets. I saw a demonstration at a press briefing this morning, and it looked like the most YouTubey mobile version of YouTube to date, with most of the major features of the full-blown version of the service, playback of videos within the browser (rather than in an external media player) [CORRECTION: I got the previous point wrong], and higher-quality video than is currently provided by the YouTube apps for iPhone and Android. Judging from the demo, it’s extremely snappy for a Web-based app–screens popped up as quickly as they would in a local application.

It also has a user interface that’s designed to be as touch-friendly as possible, without demanding the user to poke at the screen very precisely–Product Manager Andrey Doronichev even conducted part of this morning’s demo using…his nose.

The new YouTube Mobile looks cool, but it’s most interesting as a salvo in the war between local apps (a form of software championed by Apple) and Web-based ones (Google’s bread and butter). When Google writes iPhone apps–like, say, Google Voice–it’s at the mercy of Apple. When it creates browser-based services, it doesn’t need to seek anyone’s permission to distribute them to every iPhone user who cares to give them a try. And with YouTube, at least, it looks like there’s no particular advantage to writing an iPhone app–the Web-based incarnation works at least as well as a piece of native software would.

Even if the unique challenges of getting into the iPhone App Store weren’t an issue, there’s much to be said for YouTube being a Web app rather than a local one. With a Web app, YouTube can roll out new features on as aggressive a schedule as it chooses, instantly putting them in the hands of everyone who uses the service. It can’t do that with the YouTube app for Android, and the one for iPhone is completely out of its hands, since it was written by Apple. (For what it’s worth, a YouTube exec at the briefing I attended said he hopes Apple continues to update its YouTube app, and that YouTube would be happy to help.)

You gotta wonder: How long will it be until Web apps are capable of doing nearly anything a local app can? It’s not going to happen in 2010, 2011, or 2012…but it will happen.

Here’s YouTube’s blog post on the new YouTube Mobile. One surprising note: The company says that it hasn’t finished polishing up the service to work well in Safari on the iPhone 4.

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Apple Confirms iPhone 4 Reception Not a Software Problem

Posted by Ed Oswald on July 7, 2010 at 8:16 am

It’s been like pulling teeth, and it took journalists mailing AppleCare rather than Apple’s notoriously tight-lipped and selectively-responding public relations department, but we have our answer. That iPhone 4 software update will do nothing to fix the reception problems–it is a hardware issue.

Gizmodo e-mailed AppleCare support three times this week and got the same answer every time, which means that Apple has changed their tone ever so slightly. AppleCare representatives confirmed an antenna interference issue when the phone is held near that infamous lower left-hand corner. The software update would only make iPhone 4’s signal meter more accurate, and not fix the problem.

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