Mickey Papillon

Since I activated the iPhone 4 on Thursday night, I have absolutely been seeing the signal issues that many have complained about with the device.  The phone itself will show “bars” which isn’t necessarily the real indicator of reception, but not work as it should.  Lots of folks have been talking about holding the device in the bottom left cormer, which will cause the bars to go down.  While this is true, it doesn’t seem that it’s the only culprit.  I found that while out and about, the only real way to get the speeds you should expect out of 3G on the network is to not touch the phone at all.  This got me to thinking about why the folks that have cases on their phones are doing OK.  It seems that the current hardware/software configuration is not quite optimized for real world conditions.  Some are saying that they aren’t seeing an issue, and I believe them.  However, I think it’s because they are in VERY close proximity to a tower, or there are other environmental factors at play.  Keep in mind that there are hundreds or more variables to what makes a cell phone work.  Weather, tower proximity, network load, network frequency, muscle/fat ratio in a person’s hand, and others that can cause the signal to fluctuate and the actual functionality of the phone to change.

I think one of the main reasons that the Apple team did not see a lot of the issues coming was because they had cases on the devices all the time while testing.  There was no way for them to test them in the wild without masking the real physical look of the phone.  Then, when they did test them “naked” they were in an office or house where they had “perfect coverage”.  That’s my theory anyway.

Time will tell to see what Apple and Steve Jobs decide to do.  In the meantime, since I put a case (mind you, it’s an old incase designed for the original iPhone, I have seen the one thing I want…consistency.  Here are some real world results from speedtest.net that i have seen over the last 3 days.  Note the jumping around of speeds on the 25th and 26th, and how consistent it’s been on the 27th.  Can you guess when the case went on…