I was rather hoping you'd move to a good Android phone. It would have been interesting to hear your feedback after you'd gotten used to the differences. You could always have moved back to your 3GS anyway.

There is the potential for a major reception issue when you bridge the gap between the two antennas. It doesn't affect everyone obviously. The "uniqueness" comes from the iPhone's design, not the issue of antenna attenuation itself. No other phone has this type of external antenna with that type of gap between two antennas able to be touched as easily. Plenty of other phones will degrade or drop signal given attenuation by touching different elements of the phone specific to their own designs - check the videos on Youtube and Apple's site. For some people this issue will be more prevalent on the iPhone than it would be on their previous phone(s), given its physical design. For others they will be able to get signal where previously they had no signal at all, even if it's not terribly strong. Yet others won't see this problem at all.

That said, Gruber's message was funny as hell.

So, I finally got my "store pickup" email on Wednesday, I picked the phone up thursday evening.

Obviously I was a little worried by the possibility of the signal issue, so the first time I made a call I had my finger and hand all over the "iSpot" in various positions, I was unable to reproduce the problem. My signal reception at work varies from poor to ok so I was kind of expecting to have an issue but nothing happened, no dropped call, no signal breakup - I couldn't even make the bars drop in any significant way.

I installed the update that evening and played with the phone on my journey from london to cambridge and back again, again watching the signal meter while trying all sorts of iSpot touching and death grip and I couldn't get it to do anything significant. I really was expecting the lightest of touch to trigger it.

So, I fall into the group of (currently) happy campers, for the time being holding and operating the phone in a normal manner works fine for me, for that matter the death grip works fine too.

You must have a defective iPhone4. YOu should return it, since this issue is supposed to affect everyone.

I never was able to cause issues touching the iSpot during my travels in Portland and Seattle. Once I returned to Austin though, the problems came right back. So it's either something different in the networks in the two areas that minimizes it as an issue in the northwest, or possibly environmental conditions like humidity and the dryness of my skin.

Listening to MacBreak Weekly, they too were seeing mixed results. Leo Laporte stopped using it completely after dropping 5 calls in a day, though he does also live near San Francisco where it's (at least according to Jobs), a nearly 3 year process to install new towers. Andy in Chicago said he can drop bars by touching the spot, but it wasn't a big deal for him considering the other improvements on the phone. And Gruber seemed unaffected by it in Pennsylvania.

If my phone was defective, Apple wasn't interested in replacing it after 2 separate visits to the Genius Bar, even when demonstrating the issue to them.

Glad to hear it is working for you sn00p, and most likely it will work fine for Tony too.

I can't remember whether I read it elsewhere or on here, but there was apparently friction between AT&T and Apple on the first iPhone release because apple had used an infineon chipset which was more suited to europe where cell towers are much closer together. I'm not sure how accurate this is, then again both Andy and Cris are experiencing the antenna issues so I guess that it's not really a relevant fact.

I've been without an iPhone since the 18th of June and it's amazing how I've become reliant on it, my calendar is fairly important because I spend half my life at the hospital and all my appointment details live in there. The biggest loss for me was email, checking my email on the computer seemed like a step back into the dark ages, it's just so much more convenient doing it on the phone.

It's a shame that so many people are having such massive issues, because the phone is brilliant and at least for the meanwhile, it's working at least as well as my 3G did.

I don't think Apple have handled this quite as well as they could have, I think if they'd come out sooner and said "We're not sure why so many of you think you're having problems, we're looking into it" they may have avoided or at least minimised what happened in the 20 odd days following the release. Sure, they were over-exageratting the signal strength bars, but Jobs admitted that they knew that the antenna had an inherent weakness *from the start* and that "all smartphones exhibited it", they really could have said this the moment that things started to escalate.

One thing I know from the stuff we do at work is that RF is all magic, voodoo and pixie dust. As Jobs said, "we knew about it, but we didn't expect it to be such a big issue" (or words to that effect) - it's clear that they've underestimated just what the end users would see.

It'll be interesting to see what the next couple of months has instore.

The majority of iPhone users love AT&T? Wha?

Not everyone in the US lives in San Francisco or New York, but a lot of the tech writers do. Those are the two areas where AT&T does worst due to massive subscriber growth in areas with poor infrastructure to support the users. More tech writers in bad areas = more articles about how AT&T is horrible.

The only problems I have seen with my various iPhones and AT&T happen when I'm in a crowded area like a convention. Outside that, the service has worked just fine. South by Southwest was even fine this year with all the additional infrastructure AT&T rolled in downtown.

For which, it appears I've been refunded. Thanks Apple!

Speaking from a position of zero knowledge about the effect (not my department), maybe it's most severe in low band, ie 850MHz. If so that might explain why you don't seem to see it at all in other places that may be on 1900MHz (or in Europe where you may well be on 2100...)

It would certainly make sense that the problem would be highly frequency-dependent.

If you want to check me out being a total dork on camera, then you can see the footage of me using the iPhone 4 in the studio....

http://www.vimeo.com/13502071

Cheers

Cris.

It's quite funny that even after all this time, the shutter noise the iphone makes is from a film camera, after the click you can hear it winding the film on.

Nice vid Cris.

FWIW, AT&T is miserable in RTP, too.

Not for the first time (but the first time I've been able to discover where I remembered the quote from), I'm reminded of this:
--Robert Forward, "Rocheworld", 1982.

Can I just say: 1982.

Peter

It helps when one is not just a fabulist, or a theoretical physicist, but also an engineer.

The scene: Vixy & Tony are performing a concert entirely acoustically to a small auditorium. No amplification. She's having to sing a lot harder than usual in order to be able to project to the audience. It's going well.

An acquaintance with a large DSLR camera begins taking pictures, and it's doing the CLICK WHIRRR BEEP BEEP BOOP noises with each exposure. Possibly the most annoying thing in the world in that situation.

I ask him later why he didn't turn off those noises on his camera and he says "you can't turn them off on this camera". I called bullshit, and he later discovered the deeply buried menu settings to disable the sounds. Gr.

Awesome.

Of course, what I'm seeing there is lighting gear and studio technique; at that point with that kind of lighting, any CCD will do. But it's a great demo of how any camera can be made to produce good results in the hands of a professional. Much like any half-decent instrument can produce beautiful music in the hands a of a talented musician.

As long as it's tuned properly :-)

Heh. I started doing the promo photography for my wife's community theatre. It took me several shoots before I remembered I could (and should) turn off the auto-focus beeps. At least I'm only shooting during dress rehearsals. Without a blimp/silencer, though, there's not much you can do about shutter and mirror noise on an SLR. So far, the actors have been very tolerant.

You've obviously never tried to get a good a picture out of almost any HTC phone then! My HTC Prophet, TyTn II and HD all had absolutely pitiful cameras on them. It's only my HD2 that seems to be anything other than total crap. The camera on the iPhone 4 is considerably better than any phone I've owned before.

I wouldn't have minded that. I'm aware that there's gonna be a true mechanical click on an SLR. It was the artificial and unnecessary electronic sounds that were supposed to simulate an old school electric film advance mechanism, as well as the BEEBEEP noises it made after each exposure. That's just terrible.

It's like the push to add extra fake engine noise to electric cars. Come on, people, in the digital age we can move past the awful limitations of the old technology. Let's EMBRACE the peace and quiet rather than deliberately disturbing it.

That was a request from societies for the blind, as they can now not hear if a car is coming at a crosswalk.

And the camera noise on P&S and cell phones was a request from the League of Skirted Women. Really.

I'll bet they could be heard if the other vehicles weren't so noisy.

Yeah, I want my car to sound like a rocket ship. Whoosh, zoom, etc.

Or is that not what you meant?

Ugh. Customized drivetones. I hear too much crap pop already.

Double Ugh. There are enough idiots driving cars with amps that can be herd from 3 blocks away. Encouragement in the form of a requirement to be noisy is not needed.

Looks like Best Buy is doing their own free fix for the iSpot, as long as you either bought the phone from them, or have a valid Reward Zone membership.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/28/best-buy-to-offer-free-invisibleshield-4fix-to-aggravated-iphone/

iPhone 4 prices around the world:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/choreographics/4836719813/sizes/o/in/photostream/

The infographic itself sucks (big time) but at least you can see the prices (all converted to Euros, including applicable taxes at point of sale.) Don't compare the sizes of the bars in the graph, because the genius that put together the image didn't start the bottom at zero.

Hong Kong is still the place to buy the iPhone for the least amount of money, for you globetrotters out there.