Apple Antenna Spin

Apple’s Antenna woes stemming from the poor design of the iPhone 4 are well known. But what has just gotten under my skin is this PC World article Antenna Expert: Apple is Right, iPhone 4 Signal Woes Overblown. The article is laced with the next best thing to professional lying, from a group of self professed Radio Experts AntennaSys, Inc The article blatantly claims;

“This was a non-scientific test, but it was done by two engineers who deal with RF devices for a living,”

and then this is where the spin/falsehood is;

“We succeeded in taking a five-bar display and reducing it to one bar by doing that,” Webb says. “But the call remained solid and never dropped.”

In plain sight they note First that they DID NOT DO A SCIENTIFIC TEST that yes, the signal drops, but the call is Ok. As a geek, and one who has been dealing with wireless communications for 10’s of years. This is insulting, and a professional attempt to baffle with bullshit

First a simple lesson on current digital mobile voice communications;

Speech is divided into 20 (ms) samples, each of which is encoded as 260 bits, giving a total bit rate of 13kbps (kilobits per second). This is the so-called full-rate speech coding


These 260 bit packets are transmitted in serial order with redundancy, so if a packet does not get received, it get’s retransmitted. The data is transmitted into a Time and Frequency Division Multiple Access digital channel. These slots in which the packets of voice are shared are not contiguously serial for each user. So when packets are transmitted they are separated in the channel. So the packet stream must be reassembled at the receiver side to reassemble the stream of packets back into the audio to be intelligible. the packets are chosen to be small enough so that should there be a packet timeout during transmitting/retransmitting the human ear will not detect it.

The professional lie above begins as such, in the use of unscientific terms as ‘the call remained solid’ in reality it never is, they are packets divided in the stream. They may sound solid, but that is due to the nature of human hearing which will fill in any gaps in the sound, and that the actual bit-rate of the wireless sound is very low, about the speed of a dialup modem. This does not constitute much bandwidth and can be sustained on extremely poor wired and wireless connections. It’s a lie to use this as a measure of signal strength. A piece of string and a couple of tin cans, can sustain a voice channel (analog) with no compression at all. Fidelity is in the ear of the beholder, not a scientific result.

When testing the real through put from the defective Apple antenna, the measured bitrate, collision, and retransmitting errors must be tested on a calibrated bench instrument, not by someone clamping their hands around it and listening for the shoe to drop. Someone should tell the ‘Experts’ at AntennaSys to try the same test on a string between two cans, and see if the ‘the call remained solid’ .

UPDATE:

Internet Pads everywhere

This article about a possible ARM-based Nokia tablet to come in the fourth quarter? And the author mentions that the Nokia Tablet MAY run Windows 7 Can you imagine? Nokia management shipping yet another OS on their equipment?

I think this is grounds to fire everyone at Nokia from the VP’s on up, and replace them with monkeys. They couldn’t possibly make worse decisions that this group of Nitwits.

SmartPhones in the reality distortion field.

I have had a revelation with regards to SmartPhones and the Reality Distortion Field.

Simply put, if the device, any device, that does not behave like a profit generating platform for Apple, should not be considered a Smartphone.




Platforms based on Symbian OS, BlackBerry , Windows and Palm and are based on a principal that the phone provides smart services to help the owner become more productive. To assist with the communications and telephony functionality and on the side, provide other useful apps. For the newly renamed iOS the goal is looping the customer into more expenses, locking them into Apple products, and Apple’s iPhone Ecosystem. To behave as a continuous advertisement and mobile marketing stream. A profit stream that even Razor Blade Salesmen would love.

Sorry not for me, even Android’s more subtle marketing of Google is too much for me. If you are new here, you can be excused for not knowing that I use an Open Source phone called the Nokia N900. And while Nokia has done a lousy job marketing it, it still does all the things that the mighty Apple iPhone 4.

Snow Leopard upgrade

Snow Leopard has been released for a while (like a year, dude) so I am taking the leap, and doing the upgrade of my MacBook 2.16GHz. I managed a bit of a backup to my old Maxstor drive, and was still amazed at the speed of firewire 400 over USB 2.0. No contest, with the 50G backup I did, it would still be at it.

What really made my decision for me, the upgrade that is, was my dersire to get dirty into programing with Xcode. And of course that required Snow Leopard to use the newest compilers and QT.

So now I’m counting down the next hour with the hope my old macbook will survive.


UPDATE1: I love this just when I get up to date Apple prepares an new Cat . However I don’t think this is likely as the version I how have after the DVD install, and updates only puts Snow Leopard at 10.6.3, quite a bit short of a 10.7.x update.

The Return of the N900

Sounds like a Saga doesn’t it? Well it might be, if for no other reason than one of learning.

My Nokia has finally returned, thrice actually. My original Nokia N900 was always having a problem with battery life, and a bit of problem with the media player application not being able to play video and The problem required a solution.

If you’ve been reading this Blog, the fiasco which resulted with the N900 being returned without being fixed my Nokia directly. But upon contacting Expansys where I purchased it, and they directed me to sent it to them. And I did, 5 weeks ago! I had contacted them after 3 weeks of no news, and they indicated that its was being ‘quality’ checked and would be sent in a few days. Another week elapsed, and I contacted them again, and again they indicated that they would sent it, 4 days later (on a monday) I was surprised to see the delivery of my N900, the same N900, WITH THE SAME PROBLEM! They even sent me back the document I included to explain how to test and identify the problem. A problem so simple, that just turning it on would identify it’s functionality. They never even tried to fix it. They simply expected me to accept it broken! Which I didn’t! Contacting them the very afternoon that it had been returned resulted in another return, on their account, to their facility. With the promise of a ‘Replacement’ Finally! And now it arrived, Yesterday, and the problem (that would appear a boot time) was gone, so I thought great. Done!

But this is Expansys The first indication of trouble, the camera, right after I opened the camera door, it indicated that it could not open the application, as there was NO MEMORY to open it, which I checked, and sure enough the user memory, some 32GB of ram was ‘corrupted’ and unusable. Broken, except to the geek, Me, who while trying to diagnose the issue with the first N900, had become an expert in ‘flashing’ the phone. So I flashed the eMMC with the ‘VANILLA_PR_EMMC’ image. And surprise, the camera worked, along with the sample videos stored there, which further proved that the old error was gone. Happy right! Not! While I was doing this testing/fixing/ I did not have my SIM installed, so having celebrated my Geek victory, I proceeded to complete my move back into my new device.

Deliberate Pause

The N900 didn’t recognize my SIM, any SIM. Not a useful thing for a Phone not to do. But I didn’t throw it across the room, or jump up and down crushing it into dust. I rallied the Geek, and did a System Flash with the latest Maemo Image. And without further adieu, it worked, I had a phone, and it works. Having inserted my micro SD card I restored my backup from the previous N900, and Bingo, it works. I did not restore the applications that I had installed previously, but enough to know that it mostly works. I did not install some of the communications extensions that knew were causing performance issues with the battery. It’s been 7 hours and I’m only down one bar, the battery works!

The bottom line, Expansys is a pain to work with! They took ages to return my ‘repaired’ phone, that wasn’t repaired, nor did they do ANY QUALITY CHECKS to see if it had been repaired. Then after being forced to do the ‘right’ thing, they replaced it with another (non-working) phone that was Obviously NOT NEW. I can only assume that it was another used N900 that someone had returned. To anyone else this replacement was more broken than the one I had sent in, and only by my own hand does it work at all. Not a good place to do business. The experience has taught me never to purchase an item like this via the internet. Better to spend the extra money to have a place to return it to, and this one has cost me plenty in time and shipping costs to resolve.

One last point, both the first N900, the one with the broken DSP, it still worked, with the only real impact being shortened battery life. The replacement, broken also, has been corrected, as far a I can see, via software alone. Making the N900 and very reliable, although quirky device. One I can still recommend. Try doing those things with your iPhone, OOPS, sorry, no can do.

Perfect purposing for an E-Book reader.

With all the iPad hype from the past week or so you would think that the E-Book market was dead. But I have thought of a niche for such things, and it’s one that even the iPad can’t fill. That of a personal printer replacement. My wife is a notorious printer user. Partly as she collects vast amounts of bits of paper in her researches, but she finds it easier to read printed paper rather than a computer screen. Hence our recent replacement of our old, broken, and much used printer with a new HP F4850 .

But what if an E-Book reader manufacture produced a ‘Printer’ dock that would allow the E-Book to act as a printer. You could ‘print’ your web research, documents, and any other output normally assigned to paper, to your chosen E-Book? Sounds like a solution to me. Readability without the cost of printer ink. Most E-Books support Postscript and PDF formats, so it’s unlikely that any special hardware would be required, just a dock that emulates a usb or WiFi printer.

Sounds like a project to me, anyone?

iPad Virtual Keyboard censorship

This thought has come to mind as there are many voices out there who have commented on the iPad’s virtual Keyboard‘. Many have found it hard to type on and found themselves unable to touch type on it as the very nature of touch sensitivity makes it impossible make contact with the ‘keys’. In other words, you can’t type long missives, emails or any other textual input.

What if the iPad is a form of Censorship? Making it hard to comment on the internet, create content, write Twitters/email/Blogs whatever. Because the keyboard it too hard and frustrating to enter anything other than simple search phrases. A consumer ONLY device, made to fill the passive vessels that constitutes the bulk of the internet readership? Content omnivores as Pew Research calls them, an advertising and News consuming only population.

Another iPad prediction

Having read this article about iPad sales predicted to top 7.1 million in 2010 alone, the term, FanBoy gains a new meaning, Delusional! It’s not that the iPad isn’t cute, or that it won’t BE fun or even useful. It’s that this is still a recession, and there aren’t 7.1 Million geeks in the world who have enough money to buy this thing. The second point, Apple with all it’s planning couldn’t get God to manufacture 7 million of these things this year.

I almost assumed that the article was a late April Fool’s joke. But there really are a lot of people who believe that Apple can do no wrong. Mostly because of youthful forgetfulness no one seems remembers the Cube and even though Steve Job’s was not at Apple, still there was the Newton.

I remember, I still have a Newton 100, which I upgraded from the the original Messagepad. And I think, I’m even pretty sure the sales of the iPad will not exceed 1 million sales this year. I can almost guarantee they will NOT exceed 2 Million. Given that, it will still be profitable, and considered a success. I might even like to have one, except of the fact that I already have something a lot more practical, and ultimately more useful, a Nokia N900!

Update One: I’m calling BullShit on the 700,000 iPads. At best there was 500K with less than 100k which were not pre-orders.

Apple knows best what you want on your iPhone.

In another example why I’m happy with my choice of the Nokia N900 over the iPhone as Apple removes Wi-Fi finders from App Store . After all, Apple knows better than it’s customer what it should allow on IT’S product. The customer is stupid and incapable of using OUR product without proper controls.

So Apple joins Amazon in determining what the customer should be allowed to do on THEIR product.

How to perfect the iPad.

The answer is simple, the processor that Apple has chosen for their new iPad is called the A4 which is really just a ARM Cortex A9 with an integrate GPU. And guess what, there is another OS, a better OS, that is both touch integrated and ported to the Cortex / ARM cpu, Maemo which you can test for yourself on the at maemo.org or handle as the Nokia N900 pocket computer cum Smartphone. This OS can do everything that the iPhone OS can’t do like Multi-task and Flash. Sounds like a perfect iPad, just jail-break the iPad and install Maemo.

Apple’s iPad, misses the mark.

Since I didn’t bother to comment on what is now a fan frenzy event and the flurry of rumors preceding it, the Apple iPad has now appeared, and I will comment, Meh! Everything that the pad does, I can do with the Nokia N900, for less money, and I can carry mine anywhere. I even have a real, though small keyboard. Mind you I like the new screen, it’s nicely sized, but I have a MacBook with a bigger better screen. Is there really a gap to fill, sure sort of, and this can fill it, maybe, but will it be the next big ‘thing’ NO!

UPDATE: The spec indicates only 720p Video playback, and that’s probably due to the performance of the Apple CPU, putting it into Intel Atom processor range as far a horsepower goes.