Rotophonic

iPhone 4 Seems Destined for a Recall

After a few weeks of having the iPhone 4 to kick around, my feelings are decidedly positive about the usability of the device, but I have to say that the iPhone 4 Antenna Issue is so significant that I can't imagine Apple not having to issue a recall and fix this phone. Take a look at these screen grabs that I took in Speed Test on the iPhone 4:

This first one was taken with the iPhone 4 resting on the palm of my hand with my hand only touching the glass back of the phone. Nice near-T1 speeds. Sweet

Uh oh. This next grab is the speed test done while I was holding the phone the same way I have always held my iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 to do anything with it: holding it in my left hand with my fingers wrapped around the bottom of the phone. As you can see, the ping test took over 18 seconds(!) to complete and while the download test achieved a speed slower than a 14.4K modem, the upload test never even completed a single transmission. Not only that, I could literally feel heat from the antenna rapidly increase against my hand as the transmitter/receiver punched up the power levels to try and get a signal.

Then yesterday, I'm on the phone with my Mom and at first the call is nice an clear but unbeknownst to me, my hand had slipped down into the iPhone 4 Chokehold position (or, for Steve Jobs, where everyone in the universe holds their iPhones). She began saying, "You're breaking up. You're breaking up..." "Oops...," I said as I moved my hand to daintily hold the phone by its top side near the speaker. "That's better," she said. It happened once more as I continued the call.

I can't help but think that Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive have become so cocky about pushing around their software engineers to think outside the box and do things that the engineers initially thought were impossible that they actually believed that the antenna experts on the iPhone team (and lets hope there are antenna experts on the team) were just being cranky and their warnings about the dire effects of the iPhone 4's antenna design were just "an inability to be creative and focus on user-centered design." 

And beyond that, I believe that by the time Steve Jobs had demonstrated the iPhone 4 to the public he was fully aware of the issue: it's not something that you wouldn't notice. Yes, during their early tests of the device when they had it wrapped up in a disguise, they may not have noticed it as much, but certainly after Apple started to seed more devices around the Cupertino campus you'd have to notice. You notice it doing every day things with the phone. Simply hold the phone in your hand and the signal drops out. Sit on the couch and play Bejeweled: your signal disappears. Make a call: your signal drops out. This is a situation where you could not be any further from "user-centered design." Jobs says, "Don't hold the phone that way." Really? How defensive is that response? 

To me it seems clear that Jobs *knew* this was a major issue even as he presented the iPhone 4 at WWDC. Wouldn't Jobs have been more curious about the source of this signal dropout problem when it was raised on, literally, the first day the device made it into the hands of customers? He'd only be curious if he'd never heard of the issue. He'd only be curious if he hadn't already had hours of stressful internal meetings with engineers to try and fix the issue as millions of poorly designed phones were being manufactured in China. He'd only be curious if he hadn't already conceded to his antenna engineers that he was wrong about the design and should have listened to them better. "Just avoid holding it that way." Hmmm. That seems like something a cranky engineer would say.

Sounds to me like he's trying to downplay what he knows is a very serious problem: if I were him, I'd avoid the PR strategy makes you look like the BP CEO explaining how the blown-out oil well isn't as big an issue as it seems since there's so much water in the Gulf of Mexico. Competition in this space is heating up a lot and some honesty and positive action on the issue from Jobs would make a huge difference. Every iPhone 4 owner right now is asked by every potential new iPhone 4 owner, "Is holding the phone an issue?" And right now, the answer is, "Yes." Even Jobs agrees on this point. This is not the way to ensure Apple's dominance through the Android onslaught over the the coming year.