Tuesday, August 26, 2008

iPhone 3G antennas are fine says GP

iPhone 3G antennas are fineWestern Sweden’s largest newspaper, Göteborgs-Posten (or The Gothenburg Post for us American’s who have no idea how to pronounce words with dots above them), says there is nothing wrong with the antenna inside of the iPhone 3G. They were curious to check out just how well the antenna actually performs, so they did.

They used a testing chamber made by a company called Bluetest. The chambers are used by cell phone manufacturers to see how well phones receive and transmit data under certain circumstances without actually needing to go into the field.

They found the antenna of the iPhone 3G to be perfectly normal.

We compare the results with those of a Sony Ericsson P1 belonging to Bluetest’s CEO Mats Andersson, and my Nokia N73. The P1 is a little better at receiving signals and the N73 a little better at transmitting signals. But the difference is small. The difference between the iphone’s and the P1’s receive sensitivity is 2 dB.

While there is a difference, the article states that it’s not abnormal until it’s more like 4-6dB off.

So, with mixed signals (no pun intended...seriously) coming from every which way about the iPhone 3G and its reception issues, it’s hard to find the truth. GP’s data suggests bad reception is a result of the network, though their data does not seem to address how the iPhone 3G performs on a network with more than one 3G capable phone. AT&T has long held that the problem is not on their side, and Apple has acknowledged the iphone 3G reception issue and is said to be working on a patch. To me, it really sounds like the issue is with the iPhone software and large numbers of users accessing 3G networks at once.

Software, hardware, or network, I don’t really care, I hope this gets fixed soon.

Via [GP]

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