July 25, 2010

Below is a comment from maati on this engadget article. Huzzah science. My sister still hasn’t gotten her iPhone 4 so I still don’t have first hand impressions.

@bighap Apple failed.

And they’re lying about the nature of the problem.

No other phone suffers from the same issues.

Here are the facts, the real ones:

Anandtech has shown that the Nexus One’s signal drops by only 10dBm when holding it normally, while the iPhone 4’s signal drops by 24dBm.

Even when gripped tightly, the Nexus One’s signal drops by only 17dBm, compared to 24dBm on the iPhone. And of course, nobody holds his phone like that in normal use.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-apples-ios-41-signal-fix/3

CNET have done a video that has shown that, even when the iPhone 4 has 5 bars, by just touching the weak spot, the person on the other end can’t hear you anymore.

Source: http://cnettv.cnet.com/iphone-4-antenna-tests/9742-1_53-50090044.html

German Stiftung Warentest have done scientific testing and seen the iPhone 4’s reception drop by 90% when the weak spot gets touched.
They could not make other phones drop more than 25%, even when gripping them tightly.

Source: http://www.test.de/themen/computer-telefon/schnelltest/4116516-4116521/

Steve Jobs himself has confirmed that the iPhone 4 drops up to one more call per 100 than the 3GS (it must be very close to one, otherwise he would have used other numbers). AT&T’s average dropped call rate is 1.44%, they claim.
If the iPhone 3GS is an ‘average’ AT&T phone, that means the iPhone 4 drops about 67% more calls than the 3GS. A HUGE increase!

Source: boygeniusreport.com/2010/07/21/att-we-have-a-1-44-dropped-call-rate/

The real issue is not that you can make the signal drop, but HOW and by HOW MUCH.

HOW: Hold the iPhone 4 naturally in your left hand, like everyone does while surfing or making left-handed calls.
That’s very different from ‘death-gripping’.

HOW MUCH: 20dBm vs. 10dBm or 90% vs. 25% or 99% vs. 90%, depending on your system of measurement. Or, in other words: Much more than with other phones.

And I can even explain to you WHY the iPhone has those problems and other phones don’t.

The iPhone 4 is the only phone that lets yoou ground the antenna by bridging it with other metal parts.

Other phones let you shield the antenna, which of course causes attenuation. A drop of 10dBm means power drops by a factor of 10, or 90%.

But that’s very different to grounding the antenna, which causes it to become completely ineffective. A drop of 20dBm means power drops by a factor of 100, or 99%.

That means, if you hold both phones naturally, the Nexus One still recieves ten times the radiation power of the iPhone 4.

At -91dBm (the minimum for full 5 bars in iOS4.0), the Nexus One only shows 3 bars, but it can still easily make crystal clear calls when held naturally, even though it loses 10dBm, whereas the iPhone 4 gets very close to dropping the call, which happens at -113dBm.

Bars don’t mean anything. If one phone shows 4 bars at -90dBm and another shows 4 bars at -80dBm, the radiation power recieved by the first phone is still 90% less than that recieved by the latter.

By showing us bars, instead of doing real reception and audio quality measurements, Apple essentially admits that other phones don’t have any real issues

now for the post that doesn’t suck… July 19, 2010

School is going to be hell this semester. My grades have been well below my standards in college for reasons that are sometimes out of my control. I can’t afford to let anything affect my grades negatively this semester. FOCUSSSSSS POCUSSSS (yeah, i don’t know what this is either. it sounded catchy in my head while i was typing.)

 

Summer break is about 2/3 over, and I’ve done nothing of value thus far. I’m ok with it though. If it means I have a little more mental energy for better grades fall semester. Besides, I have an internship starting Monday (Yeah it means I only have a 2 week internship….) so the summer won’t have been a waste.

 

ALMOST FORGOT!!!! Last Thursday, I pulled off an epic snipe on ebay for a pair of GOLD JS WINGS. Within 5 minutes before the auction ended, bidding went from $65 to $85 when there were only 30 seconds left. Then, with 15 seconds remaining, I placed my first bid, a maximum bid of $90 which brought the auction up to $86. With 5 seconds left, in a last ditch effort, another bidder placed a maximum bid of $89, which my $90 max bid automatically outbid, giving no one else time to react. I’m sure it doesn’t seem nearly as exciting when you’re reading about it. But I’m sure most people can appreciate this level of awesomeness: the gold colorway of JS wings retail for $240 and they rarely go for under $135 on ebay. I’m still waiting for them to ship, but here’s a picture to save you people the trouble of googling if you don’t know what JS Wings look like:

 

SORRY LADIES YOUR SHOE COLLECTIONS SUCK MINE IS BETTER

 

I got a massive haircut yesterday. It’ll grow back eventually.

 

Look forward to more frequent but shorter posts once the school year starts. (Plus an epic Australia post)

 

Less than 3 weeks until Australia (and APEX, but I probably can only go for day 2), and about a month until I move into my apartment at UIUC. Time is flying. Good thing I’ve got wings for it now. (JS WINGS LOLOLOLOL GET IT?)

difficulties July 19, 2010

My body is refusing to cooperate with me. I fear that I won’t be satisfied with my running for many months. Maybe that fear will blow over once I’m at school and running with the club everyday. For now, I feel pathetic when I run. I barely make it through 40 minute runs, and it’s quite common for me to have to stop 20 minutes into a run because I’m winded and my muscles feel like they’re failing. This isn’t a mental issue. It couldn’t be. I’ve been patient with my body up until this point, and the occasional terrible run (in reality, this occurs more often than not now) has become impossible to ignore. This isn’t a self pity post though. The only realistic solution is for me to to accept that fact that my body is going to need substantial time before that 4:33 mile PB is changing.

 

I’m rather curious why, on a biological level, it has been so difficult for me to regain fitness. Is it because my bout with mono took away so much from my body during the initial illness (2 weeks) that it is still recovering? Or is it because my body is still constantly debilitated by the long term effects of mono? (4 and a half months later) I’m not sure if my sentence structure properly distinguishes the two scenarios I visualized in my head, but hopefully it does.

 

All I need to feel much better about this period of terrible running is some sign of improvement. I’ve been unable to move up from 40 minute runs to 50 minute runs, and as soon as that happens, I think I’ll be in much better shape psychologically.

a brief update to hold you (mostly sam) over July 13, 2010

It seems I’ve gone another 2 weeks without a post. It was a pretty non-eventful 2 weeks.

 

Last week, I went to rutgers to visit aaron (doing research for the summer). we smashed and got pho with jon (cute underclassman coming to UIUC), cathay, (no comment) and lisa. (no comment as well) I mention this only because sam is a pho-freak. (Try saying that IRL; it sounds weird.)

 

It would be really nice if I could stop losing weight. (Mom’s good cooking is making me eat a lot more, but it’s not helping me gain weight at all…) I’m below the weight I was at when I started college. Rather frustrating considering I’ve been trying to gain weight this entire time. I weigh less than a few too many females.

 

Running

It’s frustrating. I ran into Mccaff today at the park, and he said it’s normal for my body to be taking so long to regain fitness after mono. So I guess makes me feel a little less shitty about it. Still very shitty nonetheless. These past few weeks of running have been as frustrating as my racing was junior year. Eventually it will get better with training, but it feels like it’ll be an eternity before I’m doing runs that I can be proud of. I need to do a lot more of my runs with other people because the mental difficulty of running alone when out of shape is compounding my problems. I’ve reduced all of my core and upper-body stuff in an effort to focus all of my energy on getting my legs, heart, and lungs back.

 

My internship with AT&T still hasn’t started. The application processing is taking forever. At this rate, I’m going to set a record for shortest internship ever.

 

I finally got around to setting up my wii for homebrew and more importantly, smash texture and audio hacking. It was a painless process. They’ve boiled down the instructions to the point where even a trained gorilla could do it.

 

I don’t think I can bring myself to write anymore tonight. (Writer’s block. I feel like I have other things to write about, but nothing comes to mind at the moment) I’ll play some DS (Ace Attorney Investigation: Miles Edgeworth. I highly recommend the entire Ace Attorney series to anyone who hasn’t tried it. It’s great for some relaxing logic and reasoning.) before I hit the hay.