By Anthony Caruana, IT News
The iPhone 4 will be available in Australia on 30 July.
Steve Jobs unprecedentedly called a press conference today for Apple to deal directly with the massive controversy about the iPhone 4 and its supposedly flawed antenna design.
Calls for a product recall or making sort of restitution to the three million customers who have purchased the latest smartphone to come from Cupertino have resulted from the issue.
The matter was so urgent that Jobs cut short a vacation in Hawaii in order to make his presentation.
Just as usual, he started his presentation in the way he is famous for, which is applying statistics.
After reeling off sales figures he stressed that iPhone 4 has received very positive reviews from a large quantity of respected reviewers. However, since issues were first raised just over three weeks ago, Apple’s engineering team has been “working its butt off”.
Interestingly, though Apple’s reputation was declining, there was one sentiment that was constantly repeated throughout Jobs’ presentation – “we love our users”.
This phrase and others like it were repeated several times.
Other phones have problems
In the main part of his presentation, he demonstrated that other smartphones had the same problem as iPhone 4.
He stressed that the fluctuation of number of coverage bars depended on how the phone is used.
He showed this off with a Samsung Omnia II, BlackBerry Bold 9700 and HTC Droid Eris.
By doing this, he tried to show that not only Apple has this kind of problems, but also other products. There were on the same boat.
However, during the Q&A at the end of Jobs’ presentation, an audience member challenged Jobs saying that the signal bars of his Blackberry stayed the same wherever he went.
Jobs responded that “You may not see it in certain areas”.
On Friday morning (Australian time) Apple delivered the promised software patch for the iOS 4 that fixes the algorithm that calculates the number of bars that are show to indicate signal strength.
Jobs described the testing of the iphone as a “state of the art test facility”, which cost over $100 million to create.
Better than 3GS?
Jobs did admit that about 16,500 complaints (about 0.55 percent of customers) about the iPhone 4′s signal reception had been lodged.
And 1.7 percent of customers (about 51,000) have returned their iPhone 4. However, compared to the return rate for the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4 is far lower than the six percent.
So, it seems that while there is a lot more noise being made about the iPhone 4, customers had more issues with the iPhone 3.
One of the obvious consequences of compromised signal strength is that calls are dropped more often.
On the basis of the data released by Apple’s carrier partner in the US, he iPhone 4 drops fewer than 1 in a 100 calls more than the iPhone 3GS. That is, the call performance of the iPhone 4 is worse than the iPhone 3.
Given all the hoopla there seems to be a marginal difference in call dropout rates.
Yes, but what about my iPhone4?
A free bumper case is going to be given to every iPhone 4 owner by Apple, which is used to prevent users from placing their hand over the troublesome bottom-left corner of the iPhone 4.
Customers who have already purchased a case will receive a refund. Besides, every new customer will receive a free case until September 30.
Customers will be able to apply for a case through Apple’s website from next week.
Additionally, any customer who has purchased an iPhone 4 has 30 days to return it for a full refund.
After September 30, Apple will reevaluate the situation. A decision as to whether the free case will continue to be provided will be made.
The iPhone 4 will be available in Australia from 30 July 2010. A bumper case will be made available to Australian purchasers.
The Q & A
While senior Apple vice presidents Tim Cook and Bob Mansfield sat down beside him, Jobs allowed a short Q&A at the end of his presentation.
Compared to Jobs’ ease in handling question, Mansfield failed to give a satisfactory answer when he was asked why even the smallest touch can affect the signal reception.
In contrast, when Jobs was asked if Apple knew of the iPhone 4′s signal issues, which was suggested in an article by news service Bloomberg, Jobs called the Bloomberg story “crock” and “total bulls—”.
Signaling a further change in the usually locked down Apple communications strategy, Jobs also admitted that his engineering teams were looking into issues with the proximity sensor.
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