The Shady Milkman

tj:

Instructions from my Nokia 2320 which boil down to “avoid holding it that way.”

This stems from Nokia deciding to take a jab at Apple and say you can hold Nokia phones any way you damn well please, after Steve Jobs and Apple said to “avoid holding [the iPhone 4] that way.”

Hold the phone.

While it’s perfectly OK to show this and say that Nokia (and all phones, for that matter) are in the same boat as the iPhone 4 when it comes to antenna distortion, it’s not an even, apples-to-apples comparison. This manual comes from a basic cell phone, released in 2008, that’s light on the features compared to today’s standards. It is not the manual for a premium, highly touted smartphone like the iPhone 4.

The signal interruption isn’t even the main issue here for me.

All along, I’ve been saying that the problem is not that the iPhone 4 may lose reception by holding it a certain way; it’s that Steve Jobs decided to emphasize how the iPhone 4 had an antenna built into the framework:

This doesn’t look like Apple… what are these lines? They are part of the primary structural elements of the phone… this is part of brilliant engineering. It uses the band as part of the antenna system!

—Steve Jobs at WWDC 2010

Not only that, but instead of mentioning how holding the phone with a certain hand in a certain position could interrupt a signal, their promotional videos instead clearly contradict their instructions to “avoid holding it that way”:

The bottom line is that Apple “blew it” by not catching this issue in testing, maybe because their field testing was mostly conducted with the phone in a camouflage iPhone 3GS case, and now the Apple zealots are trying to ignore that fact by claiming it’s no big deal because it’s a common issue with any phone, when, in fact, this issue would not nearly get the airtime it has gotten (it was even predicted before hand) if Steve Jobs didn’t tout the “brilliant engineering” of putting the antenna outside the phone in the first place!

Cut the crap. Admit the oversight. Move on.

/end rant