The new Apple iPhone 4 was supposed to be a tool to make life easier. Instead what the Apple iPhone 4 has provided is terrible signal strength, a high percentage of dropped calls, and a level of frustration that hasn’t come from many cell phones before this one. Having also owned an Apple iPhone 3G S mere days after it came out, the purchase of an iPhone 4 was supposed to be a move in the direction of better service and performance. That hasn’t turned out to be the case, and the excuses coming from Apple about why this is happening just don’t provide the consumer confidence that anyone would want from an expensive purchase such as this.
With an AT&T plan, we get the discounted version of the new phones each time they hit the market, but paying $199.99 for a new cell phone might not seem like that large of a discount. I use smart phones in order to constantly stay connected to the internet, to run chat programs, and to be constantly updated with my e-mail accounts. We were late to the rush on the iPhone’s in our family, but were ultimately sold by a sales person who convinced us that the internal antenna was going to be the best that AT&T had to offer. Sure it sounded like a sales pitch, but having lived through several cell phone contracts with phones that dropped calls, it sounded like a deal that we couldn’t pass up.
I should first mention that the Apple iPhone 3G S had its own problems with dropped calls and weak signal strength. This is despite our house being quite close to a cell tower here, and despite being told that the signal was going to be strong in our area of the city due to AT&T having a wide net of coverage. All great selling points, but if we were to rely only on the performance of these phones to give our opinion on the truth of the statements, it wouldn’t bode well for the AT&T employees.
The iPhone 4 has even more problems than the iPhone 3G S when it comes not just to getting a signal, but keeping the other person on the line. There are frequent moments where the signal will show “no service”, and then suddenly jump to five bars a few moments later. That tells us that there must be something going on with the new external antenna that Apple has placed on the new iPhone. The solution? Apparently we can only hold the phone a specific way if we don’t want the phone signal to become extremely degraded, and that just isn’t easy to do when one of the users is left handed. The most frustrating item with the new iPhone is the dropped calls though, where the other caller is coming through clearly, and then suddenly there is nobody on the other end.
There are some serious issues that Apple and AT&T need to be able to address with the Apple iPhone 4, and we don’t believe that it has to do with their claims of a software issue. Frustrations continue to mount with the use of the new iPhone, and yet we still stay with this latest smart phone. Why do we punish ourselves like this? For the reason Apple assumes that we will; because all the bells and whistles of the iPhone 4 almost make it a must-have, and because we have grown so accustomed to what a cell phone with such impressive processing speeds has to offer.
Reference:
Apple_Antenna_Problem_Response
