One Bad Apple

by Paul McGoldrick

Sometimes you can write and speculate about something and be either incredibly right, or incredibly wrong. Other times you can just kick yourself for not following your own instincts properly. Case in point: when the iPhone 4 was formally announced about a month ago I wrote about the case designed antenna: “How that antenna’s propagation characteristics are not completely messed up by the human holding the phone may be explained by the breaks in the metal’s circumference, suggesting that the top part of the case metal is the real antenna.”

Selling 1.7 million phones in the first three days of availability was a major coup for Apple – probably a retail landmark indeed. But it didn’t take long for the stories about poor reception and dropped calls to start building up. The first responses from the company were that the RSSI software was screwed up and that the indicated “bars” were optimistic, and had been from the iPhone’s inception.

Then came the announcements that the new phones needed to be held in a certain way – or, at least, that certain methods of holding should be avoided.

To the RF-knowledgeable among us it became very obvious, very quickly, what was happening. The very act of holding the phone across the gaps in the outer metal of the case was changing the propagation characteristics quite dramatically. We are probably looking at a grounding effect on the main antenna: and not one that was designed… The mitigating claim that all mobile phones suffer from similar antenna problems became laughable as soon as it was suggested.

And the idea that a software fix could somehow cure this signal strength problem is so totally absurd, it is a wonder that Cupertino would dare talk in that direction. Now that Consumer Reports has damned the phone’s antenna system it is way time that Jobs and company took some very fast remedial action to save the company’s reputation and the damage that is being created to its stock value – and, ultimately, to its bottom line.

Consumer Reports rather jokingly, one assumes, suggested that good old duct tape might be the answer. A non-conductive strip of tape, strategically placed across one of the antenna joints could save the day! More practically, of course, the use of a bumper case enveloping the phone (in teenage parlance, I understand, a “skin”) would provide the electrical isolation to prevent a total RF disaster, although the same human user’s physical presence and the capacitive effects through the case are still not going to be benign to propagation compared to phones where the manufactured plastic case is providing much better RF isolation.

Apple has been studious in making sure that no free bumper cases are offered as a solution by its AppleCare operators. That may have been logical (and also prevents any admission to liability) in that there are probably not 1.7 million suitable bumpers in existence yet, remembering that the iPhone 3 offerings (mostly silicone) would fit like a bad overcoat.

Eventually, however, and sooner rather than later, the free bumper case is almost certainly the direction that Apple will have to go. Recalling the phones would be the right thing to do, but Apple will not be going there. Making mechanical changes is not practical. Rushing the iPhone 4G to market as a replacement could only be a solution after extremely expensive, and time consuming, mechanical retooling for the body of the phone. In any case the class action suits are going to come and a total recall would have been the only legal solution to that future mess.

But there is something else bothering me here as well. It is extremely possible that the iPhones that have been subjected to human intervention in the antenna radiation characteristics have had the RF circuits exposed to VSWRs approaching 10:1. Although the PAs being used are, undoubtedly, tested to that kind of reflection level, they are probably not repeatedly stressed to frequent exposure to that level at full power. Each of these phones that has had its propagation performance challenged during reception will have also been operating at full transmission power to try overcoming the perceived weak signal conditions.

How much life will be wiped off these PA circuits? Is Apple going to accept a flood of warranty claims during the first year of the limited hardware warranty or the second year purchased through the AppleCare Protection Plan? (Remember, they will only talk to you for free in the three months after your original purchase unless you do buy into the Protection Plan.)

Oh, and it is nice to see that the obviously quasi-technical residents of One Infinite Loop in Cupertino still believe that 1GB (sic) – they mean 1 Gbyte, not 1 giga bell, of course – is equal to 1 billion bytes…

Since this Editorial was written about two days ago, Apple convened a hastily organized press conference where Steve Jobs admitted that the company was not perfect. He said all iPhone 4 purchasers would receive a free bumper for their phones and that if they were unhappy with the product they could receive a full refund. Unfortunately typical of the modern age was that the apology offered was qualified by the statement that the problems “had affected less than one per cent of iPhone users,” and that Apple had been “working its butt off” to find a solution to the problem.

If the less than 1% fact is, in fact, true it is only because the other 99 % have yet to operate their phones in a lower signal strength area.