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Vintage Steve Jobs Tackles iPhone 4 Issues and the Critics

Vintage Steve Jobs Tackles iPhone 4 Issues and the Critics

A surprisingly defiant Apple CEO resets reality for its most popular product, the iPhone 4.

Friday’s Apple press
conference was vintage Steve Jobs. He was sharp, analytical, tough, and,
seemingly, unafraid to tell the collected media: The emperor has no
clothes.

In the days and hours leading up to the event, pundits—and even betting
sites—were placing odds on all sorts of possibilities. The most
outrageous theory was that Apple would recall all 3 million iPhone 4s that it had just sold. (A close second in
the ridiculous department was the idea that Apple would offer a rebate.)
Even before polling
readers, I knew this was an impossibility. You don’t recall a
product that poses no potential harm to customers. No, annoyance doesn’t
really count as harm.

Many people expected the Apple CEO to fall on his sword and apologize
for everything—from, allegedly, ignoring the warnings of his engineers
to being far too confident about the “magical” nature of his products.

Initially, as Jobs spoke and talked through the iPhone 4 antenna
issues, I worried he was being too flip. He called it “AntennaGate” and
seemed to be telling us things we all already knew. Then I realized that
he was simply acknowledging the facts of mobile antennas and making
something of an admission. Yes, Apple knew people could attenuate the
external antenna if the phone was held a certain way, but it did not see
this as a significant problem, nor did the company find this
significantly different from what you’d find with other mobile phones.

The true highlight of Apple’s press
conference, however, was Steve Jobs’ dismantling of current iPhone 4
perceptions, which revealed the reality of the situation. And this is
an area where the Apple CEO and I are in total agreement. Let’s step
back a moment first.

As the iPhone 4 situation unfolded (I, too, was able to recreate the
bar-killing “death grip”), I wondered if this was a bigger issue than I
originally thought. I went back and reread Mobile Managing Editor Sascha
Segan’s Apple iPhone 4 review. Segan said “It’s not the
best phone-calling phone” and “the iPhone 3GS actually connected
slightly more calls successfully than the iPhone 4 did—about one in ten
additional calls went through. The iPhone 4 gave a truer picture of
signal strength than the 3GS did, though; its “bar” meter is quicker to
respond to changes in RF than the 3GS is.”

Despite this, PCMag awarded the iPhone 4 an Editors’ Choice award as
the best smartphone on the AT&T network. In my experience, it makes
and hold calls fine and is certainly no worse or better than my
BlackBerry Bold, which is also on the 3G network. If all you want to do
is make phone calls, then, yes, the iPhone 4 could frustrate you.
However, if that’s all you want to do, why are you buying an iPhone and
paying all that extra money for a data plan? It’s time we acknowledge
that we buy phones like the Apple iPhone 4 for so much more than just
calls (e-mail, text, photos, video, social networking, gaming).

[Thanks: http://www.pcmag.com]

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