iPhone Signal Strength Problems In the UK 202
An anonymous reader writes "British iPhone users, who bought the Apple phones when they went on sale in England on Nov. 9, are reporting persistent problems with signal strength on O2, the UK's only iPhone service provider. The complaints started only 2 days later. InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe says there's a debate as to whether O2 or the iPhone is at fault; it appears to be the handset, which is unusual since US users haven't reported similar problems. Some 02 customers report that getting a replacement phone fixes things; others have had to do a software restore back to version 1.1.2 of the iPhone software."
Could we do away with iPhone this and Apple that? (Score:4, Insightful)
One small detail (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:signal strength (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as we're going with anecdotal evidence, I switched from a Razor to an iPhone a couple weeks ago and haven't noticed any signal strength issues.
Re:Could we do away with iPhone this and Apple tha (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:different freqs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:signal strength (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you have spotty reception? Thats where you're going to notice a change is sensitivity.
Re:Ok. So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:signal strength (Score:5, Insightful)
Because he was pointing out that anecdotal evidence is worthless.
Re:signal strength (Score:5, Insightful)
If we agree that anecdotal evidences are entirely worthless, what's Amazon, Newegg, Buy.com, etc, etc. doing putting up "Customer Reviews"? What about "Resellerratings"? Or even reports by Better Business Bureau, or Consumerist, or Consumer reports? Unless it's a designed-to-be-fair poll (which almost all online polls aren't) of statistically significant numbers (I usually go with 1000, because that gives nice 3% margin of error, assuming no other sources (such as sampling bias, wrong question wording, etc.) than random sampling error), it's little better than anecdotal evidences---a couple people lying, a company astroturfing will be enough to skew the results way over to the other side.
But, such quality results are hard to come by (I daresay even in clinical studies, let alone psychology survey, such quality is hard to obtain), so if you've ever listened to anyone you don't know personally (and somehow can trust his/her expertise), you have let an anecdotal evidence influence your judgment. Does that mean you are stupid? Well, not any more than me, the president (of U.S., of Canada, prime minister of U.K., anybody important, really), or the vast majority of rational population.
In fact, anyone dismissing an anecdotal evidence just because it's an anecdotal evidence (rather than, say, it can be shown to be false experimentally, or there is some logical fallacy) is simply repeating the folly of Descartes (of overt doubt). Except of course, unlike Descartes, he has absolutely no originality and a hindsight of several centuries, which should prevent all but utter fools from falling into such mistake.
Re:iphone is meh from a UK perspective. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Coolness" doesn't really factor in common sense I have little doubt that if I owned a iPhone and showed it to my mates they'd see it as "cool" and probably steal it off me to play with.
I think the iPhone's in the same vein as the nokia n95 and Apple Mac's far to expensive for 90% of people to ever buy since you can get most of what it does in a much cheaper phone/laptop but still cool. Unlike burberry, gold chains, big gold rings, Speedfight 2 scooters and anything else Chav.
BTW this whole post was brought to you from a person who hates the iPhone, iBooks, iPods. I just think its a testiment to the control Apple has over the media and people that it isn't seen as "uncool" just too expensive and not worth the money.
Different Handsets. (Score:2, Insightful)
> it appears to be the handset, which is unusual since US users haven't reported similar problems. Some 02 customers report that
> getting a replacement phone fixes things; others have had to do a software restore back to version 1.1.2 of the iPhone software."
It is not strange. I personally assume that the UK phones use GSM and the US phones do not, so they transmit over two completely different schemes. It is sad that this point was missed by the author of the article. Althoug I am not an expert, i remember that GSM is more sensitive to certain Problems.