Yeah but the software excuse doesn't exactly make them look better. Instead it seems as though they have been tricking people for years into thinking that they had more signal strength than they did.

Yeah getting all fanboy is silly, but only because all phone companies are squirrelly bastards. The iPhone just couples that with annoying hipsterish bullshit.

@2 - Or it means that all cell phone makers have been inflating their signal strength indicators, and Apple is the only one (now) admitting it. The iPhone is wildly popular among regular people.. if anything, hating iPhones is the "hipsterish" position now.

@3 I highly doubt companies share their algorithms for computing the number of bars to display. Why would they do that?

And really, most "regular people" don't have smart phones. There are only about 10 millionish active iPhones in the US. If anything regular people probably have a blackberry they get from their job.

The iPhone is a decent if mediocre phone. Mine bugs the shit out me with keyboard slowdowns and the crappy mail client, and I can't say I respect Apple much as a company, but eh, it really comes down to preference. I will be happy to be rid of mine when my contract is up though.

Congratulations Anthony!

@4 - Yeah, of course it's all preference. I never have any slowness with the keyboard, and every other software keyboard I've tried is far (far) slower. I hear people complain about the mail client a lot, but I don't get that either. It receives and sends mail perfectly well for me, I use it constantly. Not sure what else I'd want it to do.

More than anything, I think the whole debate over these phones shows how spoiled we all are. I work with technology everyday (everyminute), and have for many years, and I think the iPhone and other phones like it are freaking incredible. Mediocre? It's the fucking Hitchhiker's Guide, but real, in my hand, for a couple hundred bucks. Ten years ago this was still science fiction. Nitpicking the tiny details just seems so weird to me.

Babies come in 5G.

@6 I don't know, I kind of like the idea of continuing to demand more and more from companies. After all they continue to demand more and more dollars from us. Hell a cell phone was a freaking incredible a couple decades a go, as was the Palm vii. If we don't demand more we won't get more.

The biggest thing that bugs me when emailing is the lack of an underline or other indication for a spelling error. Yeah as I am typing a word it will most often give me a suggestion, but I sometimes I can't tell if I have it right or just so wrong that it does not know what to suggest. Also it only works so-so with exchange servers.

Liz Taylor is not his style
And even Liberace's smile
Is something he can't see
My baby just cares for me
And is categorically better than all your stupid cell phones

I was on an iPhone 4 talking over a bluetooth headset with a friend about her coming-in-the-mail iPhone 4. I shifted to hold it in my left hand like in every single iPhone commercial you've ever seen and said, "Oh, there's one more quirk I should mention...hello? Hello?" The call was dropped as I was about to tell her about the signal issue, seconds after I switched how I was holding it.

It's not just a reduction in visible bars...calls do drop and data slows to a crawl or freezes. I agree that any smartphone induces some crazy future-shock if I think about it too much and that people whine too much...and for this specific problem a case is a mostly-successful workaround, but Apple's statement saying that it's just perception of signal strength and that all smartphones do this is bullshit. Running speedtest.net demonstrates this even more...data drops to nothing right as you touch it, unless you're in a really strong signal area. It may be addressable by software, but the situation isn't as Apple is describing it.

Does this baby have a decent aps market?

@8 iOS 4.0 underlines misspelled words system wide. Tap the word to get a list of suggestions.

@8 - And of course I don't mean we should just hungrily lap up whatever is offered and be impressed, but I do think there's quite a sense of entitlement present in a lot of the complaints you hear, which is fine.. sure, you paid your money and you should get a quality product. My point is that the iPhone is indisputably an extremely high quality product for a pretty low price, and that most of the complaints amount to nothing but nitpicking, considering how advanced and generally solid a product it and its ilk are.

@10 - That may be. I haven't seen it that dramatically on mine. I can make the bars drop if I try, but in regular use, I've never had a problem. If it's truly a design flaw that causes widespread problems, then I would expect a solution (financial or otherwise). Also, you can return it.

@9 That made me smile.

Congratulations.

Apple is very successful, so of course it's much cooler to hate them than to like them now.

Which is why everyone hates Intel, Cisco, Oracle, and every other large, successful tech company.

Serioulsy, of all the lazy fanboy bullshit coming from Apple defenders, the idea that so many people hate them merely because they're "successful" is the most often repeated, and the most pathetic. If anybody tried to claim that people hated Microsoft for their "success," they'd be laughed of the room, and rightly so.

1. I had no idea there was something wrong with the iPhone 4 OS that wasn't related to how much it sucked to begin with, now there's bugs?
2. No.

@3
Ladies and gentlemen, Hipster Hot Potato.
'You're a hipster' 'No YOU'RE the hipster' 'You're such a hipster you call other people hipsters' 'Only a hipster would say that'.

1. Congrats on the baby. All this tech goo is irrelevant in that context.

2. You are absolutely wrong, Windows is a steaming, flaming puddle of cholera-infested moose diarrhea.

I never look at how many bars I have. I just call and start talking and if they can't hear me I call later. Because, you know, sometimes there are a lot of bars and they can't hear you and other times there's only one bar and they can hear you anyway, so what do I care about bars?

Arthur Deming would call the signal strength indicator a "substitute quality characteristic." You only need to care about substitute quality characteristics when real quality characteristics are unknowable. Brand is also a substitute quality characteristic.

That's right, Vanilla isn't better than Chocolate. Chocolate IS better than Vanilla.

Yeah, it's much more funny hating on Apple.

Congrats on the baby!

Mac is actually better than Windows.

"The point, of course, is that everybody should shut the hell up about whether iPhone or Android is better. Neither is better. They both have trade-offs. Mac isn't better than Windows, Jesus isn't better than Mohammed, and vanilla isn't better than chocolate. Yawn. Zzzz. Etc."

This would be more persuasive if Slog actually covered the smartphone market. But it doesn't, it pretty much covers the iPhone and maybe, maybe something else occasionally. But, I just paged through your Slog posts, and I saw plenty of mentions of the iPhone and Apple and nothing on their competitors, with the exception of two posts on the Nexus One (one of which was making fun of its name). No mention of Blackberries (still outselling the iPhone), no mention of other Android phones (including the first 4G phone available in the US), no mention of Nokia (largest maker of smartphones worldwide) continuing to work on Symbian and working on a new Linux platform with Intel (MeeGo), nothing about Palm's acquisition by HP and what that might mean, nothing about Samsung's Bada platform...nothing about anything going on in smartphones, in other words, other than the usual breathless coverage of Apple's stuff. So yeah, you're going to catch static for being pro-Apple because that's essentially all you talk about here. If you want to change to conversation to be about tech, then you should try covering smartphones in general. But that's not what you've done, so there we are.

By the way, the reason everybody is focusing on the antenna thing is because it's hilarious and seems to bug iPhone users.

One of the oddest things about dog sledding in Alaska up on the North Glacier was that my iPhone worked and the better half's Blackberry did not. We were north east of Juneau. I'm not complaining, because it kept him from working the entire vacation. Still, I thought that it would by my phone and AT&T that would suck. In fact it didn't matter where we went in AK or BC his darn phone wouldn't work, but mine kept chugging along. Never fear 104 e-mails came in upon arrival in Seattle.

Happy Independence Day.

Agreed on everyone calming down, but the number of bars displayed has nothing to do with dropped calls due to holding the phone wrong. Not that you'll read it, but CNET explains:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-200095…