Elegant Technology

Update: At a local Orange store I tried to replicate the signal issue on a phone with five bars. I bridged the area between the two antennae on the lower left edge of the phone and could not reduce the number of indicator bars at all. Mmm, is this really an issue?

Anyone familiar with manufacturing knows that slight variations in the process leads to occasional products that do not meet the planned standard. Many companies use the parts per million measure for quantification. For reasons of economy samples are taken from the factory and checked which means that, invariably, others slip through to the customer. These are normally resolved under warranty or guarantee.

The solution is to improve the ‘quality’ throughout the manufacturing process.

This brings me to Apple and the bad press that the iPhone 4 is getting. A week ago I read that Apple had sold 1.7 million handsets. Against this figure some people have reported issues with reception that could be related to manufacturing faults (although not according to Apple who seem to point to incorrect reporting of signal strength). Only Apple knows the extent of these issues based on customer complaints but, what might be only a few cases, have spread like wildfire across the Internet.

If 0.5% of handsets produced had faults that would equate to 8,500 potential returns. That’s a lot of potential Internet traffic. It is also a success rate of 99.5% which is pretty good by any standard.

I have colleagues with the iPhone 4 who cannot produce the signal loss issue and I have enough experience of Apple products to know that they work damn hard to produce the best hardware and software they can. I just can’t believe that this is a design issue. Apple’s design and development is the best in the world.

I await the coming software update that should better report the real signal strength available and, when I purchase the white version, will let you know if I get any problems myself.