Danny Gorog14 August 2008, 12:14 PM
The iPhone is not all it was cracked up to be, say some frustrated early adopters.
The launch of the iPhone 3G has been embarrassing for Apple in many respects: its rocky MobileMe push email service experienced outage after outage and has been widely regarded as a public relations disaster. Now, purchasers of the iPhone 3G are reporting a wide range of problems from 'glitchy 3G reception' to hairline cracks in the plastic casing of their phones.
While reports around iPhone 3G reception problems are largely anecdotal, some users are up in arms about problems with what they feel were false promises about the speed of the device.
Tom Piotrowski, Managing Director of Unixpac IT told the Sydney Morning Herald that the the speeds he's seeing on his iPhone 3G and the Optus 3G network are 'not what you expect especially when they make the claim that the 3G network is supposed to be that much faster.' Piotrowski indicates that the iPhone 3G should be able to download at the maximum quoted network speed.
One thing's for sure: In my personal testing of iPhone 3G on all three networks (Telstra, Optus and Vodafone) I can say with certainty that the 3G network coverage and real-life performance of both Optus and Vodafone in some areas is substantially inferior to Telstra's Next G network. The iPhone 3G on Optus often loses reception in the middle of Melbourne's CBD, where one would expect reception to be strong. When using a Telstra Next G SIM in the same spot, the iPhnoe gets full reception.
The network speeds seem to dramatically differ between Optus, Vodafone and Telstra too. Telstra's network (which is presumably far less congested due to the extremely high prices Telstra charges) allows web pages to be viewed and refreshed much faster than on the other two networks.
Another report from Richmond Windsor, a financial analyst (not to be mistaken for an engineer) of Nomura, a 'leading financial services group' is blaming the reception issues on the iPhone 3G's chipset, manufacturered by Infineon. His reasoning is rather questionably based on his 'experience from 5 years ago' when he heard 'similar complaints' from users of the first generation of 3G phones introduced into the European market. He says he suspects the Infineon 3G radio stack is immature.
A video uploaded to YouTube shows the comparison between a 'real' iPhone 3G and one used in Apple's TV commercial. Clearly, Apple shows the website operating much faster than it ever could in real life -- an advertising representation that may well cause them to run into trouble with advertising regulators in some countries.
Apple's intense secrecy isn't helping matters. Telco sources who spoke to APC on the condition of anonymity on the iPhone 3G launch day said it was frustrating that they'd only been given iPhone 3Gs the day before the launch, which did not allow them to do adequate network compatibility testing as they normally would with new handsets.
Apple is already seeding a new version of the iPhone operating system (2.1) to developers, and this may bring some reception quality relief if the radio stack is upgraded. But as always with Apple, the company isn't saying, let alone acknowledging any problems with the handset.
Complaints over weak reception don't seem to be slowing Apple's sales momentum. Some analysts are pegging iPhone sales at over 4.1 million in the September quarter alone.