Archive for July 2nd, 2010

Relative to the iPhone 4’s antenna issues everyone’s howling about, I’m trying to square this with this. Is the software really displaying the reception-strength bars wrong, or is it really a hand-position-muffles-antenna issue?

Independent, Apple loses an opportunity to shed its ‘too authoritarian’ image by stone-walling, especially with it’s somewhat shocking press release on the topic, parodied here by @gruber.

The Anandtech review – using real reception measurements not the graphical bars – indicates that iPhone 4’s antenna is better than earlier models in areas of low reception. This is great news for folks who have to endure poor connectivity in their usual locations, but it does nothing to explain the mysterious death grip issue – whereby holding the phone in a normal and comfortable way reduces the antenna’s effectiveness.

It’s important to point out that all phones employing the built-in-antenna or antenna-inside-case paradigms can suffer from attenuation just being held in the hand. It’s just that Apple’s problem seems dramatic – and surprisingly like something that would/should have been caught early on in the product cycle.

From my viewpoint – I’m not an iPhone owner, though I have had a long succession of smartphones – it makes perfect sense for iPhone 4 owners to get themselves a bumper-type case which reduces (resolves?) the attenuation problem. The double benefit: normal handling doesn’t ding up the phone’s case and even an occasional drop will be tolerated. To those who would get pissy over spending $29 on such a case, I’d simply ask that you take a long look at what the iPhone is costing you over the two-year period of your contract (upwards of $2000 including all fees for hardware and services) and recognize that perhaps $29 is worth it to protect that investment.

UPDATE: Here’s a great, recent, review of the iPhone 4 discussing both the quality of the device compared to earlier models (and Android devices) and the antenna issue (which, it’s claimed, happens only under low-connectivity conditions).

Microsoft is ending production of its Kin line of mobile phones, just a few weeks after US launch and days prior to their projected European debut.

That Microsoft would kill a product this early in the production cycle is a stunning change of strategy. Stunning also, given that Microsoft opted for a very different character for these devices: essentially feature phones with rich social networking capability. This approach was strikingly opposed to its traditional it’s-all-about-Windows-OS approach of the past. And it cost the top people in Microsoft’s gaming and mobility division their jobs.

What’s really sad about the loss of Kin is that Microsoft will now return to its strategy of pushing the Windows OS (Windows Phone 7) – and doing so into a marketplace where the OS has become nearly irrelevant. It’s the application model which now controls the marketplace and Microsoft long ago became a non-player in that arena. Apple’s CocoaTouch (backed up by the iTunes App Store) and Google’s Dalvik (backed up by the Android Marketplace) both have solid cores of developers – who are able to make money in these markets without being hampered by the constraints of carrier-approval. And there’s yet another core of developers pushing the limits with HTML5 and Javascript. For a broad class of applciations, this mobile web application model works fabulously on mobile browsers based on Apple’s open sourced WebKit – including Apple’s Safari on iPhone and Google’s Android Browser, along with Nokia’s Web Runtime. Perhaps needless to say, Microsoft’s mobile browser – Pocket Internet Explorer – is not based on WebKit.

Further, Microsoft’s traditional hardware partner for mobile devices – HTC in Taiwan – has all but abandoned them in favor of Google and its hot-selling Android OS. HTC got PocketPC and Windows Mobile off the ground in the early part of the decade with HP’s striking and successful line of Personal Digital Assistants, called iPaq. Later, they built a long list of mobile devices running the Windows Mobile operating systems and branded by carriers. But, after the solid (if low-key) success of its first Android phone, the Dream device – branded by TMobile as the G1 – HTC has been going to market with its brand in the forefront. Without Microsoft.

Microsoft, once the undisputed king of the industry (not to mention the stock market), looks in total disarray in the mobile space.