iPhone and signal woes

3 Dec 2007 22:40:25

Chris Hands

Before you give in to temptation and go all out for an iPhone, give a thought to how useful it is to you with little or no signal? There are a few threads on the Apple Discussion boards about signal reception in the UK, the most interesting of which is
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1233355&tstart=0
which starts with one person complaining of terrible reception and is anyone else having the same problem? The post has received 240 replies so far and the interesting thing is that in many cases the problem isn't necessarily O2 coverage, as other phones with O2 sims in the same location are getting very healthy reception.

Also, another reason to not rush toward the iPhone is its reliance on EDGE network technology for the data part of your contract. The lowest iPhone tariff is £35 for 200 mins and 200 texts, which isn't reasonable when the same amount will get you 600 mins and 500 texts as a standard O2 tariff, and a £25 standard O2 tariff gives you the same as the iPhone in terms of talk and text. So you're paying an extra £120 a year for this Edge network thingy which is slow compared to 3G (cripes!) and is expected to cover about 30% of the country by the end of the year. Do they mean us? They surely don't. Try getting any info out of O2 about their edge coverage and you'll find them, well, edgy - there's nothing on their site about it.
And on top of all that, Randall Stephenson (CEO of AT&T) let slip recently that "You'll have it next year,'" when asked about the 3G iPhone at a meeting at the Churchill Club of Santa Clara, California.

Shame though, I'd like one now.

Re: iPhone and signal woes

4 Dec 2007 18:52:25

Terry Willis

The reason the 3G connection was dropped was one of power consumption. The 3G "chipset", as I understand it, draws a considerable amount of power, therefore reducing battery life considerably. As the iPhone is meant (is) to be the first fully fledged internet device, where you have full net access all the time, this influenced the choice of chipset (balanced against battery power) for it's intended use, ie; Internet everywhere which is available *now*.

The iPhone does stand it's ground against existing devices, in that it is ground breaking technology. This does come at a cost however, which of course the keen consumer has to pay for!

Let's face it we could all buy a cheap Dell laptop/tower if we wanted, but we don't...!

Re: iPhone and signal woes

9 Dec 2007 22:33:32

Chris Hands

we could indeed Terry, but it's not as if by choosing a mac we wouldn't then be tied into using one mandatory broadband provider that charged a premium for a service we rarely got real benefit from.

My problem isn't with the iPhone itself, but the hobson's choice of contract package that goes with it and charges a premium of £10 per month for EDGE which is fine for Blackberry email but by all accounts infuriating for web browsing. And coverage isn't even guaranteed either.