El Reg points out that this is the phone whose Wifi didn't work in its own keynote, and that while the official explanation about the Wifi smog in the room is certainly plausible, it's hard not to wonder whether Steve was holding it right...
Pretty sure some site (anandtech?) noted wifi reception improved when you held the phone...
But yes, it was WiFi smog. I heard the full detail and the number of base stations in the room was accurate (they could even identify how many were MiFi's by the MAC address prefixes). The "solution" (apart from shaming people into turning points off) was kinda sweet too, involving taking all the room's official APs offline and reconfiguring them at opposite ends of the wifi spectrum, then bringing up the demo AP in the middle immediately before use, and before any clients had a chance to associate with the offical AP network.
I recall that at the time, some people commented that Google had the same issue with their demos at the Google IO conference earlier that year. Really, MiFi's and similar need to look at the surrounding wifi environment and dynamically reduce their TX power if it's keynote-busy. WiFi was just never designed to work like that.
As to why the 3GS worked better then the 4, my guess is the 3GS was on 11g and maybe that deals with insane amounts of interference better than 11n? Just a guess though, WiFi has never behaved as well as the label says it should
Previous Topic
Index
