The test from Consumer Reports qualified as "unprofessional"

By
Adrian Gabor
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An electromagnetic engineer from the US criticizes the way the famous publication Consumer Reports did it tests regarding the quality of the signal on the new iPhone 4. According to it, the iPhone 4 terminal should have been closed in a special room that would protect the phone from possible interference, placed on a non-metallic pedestal, and the test module should have been placed outside the room. He also criticizes the way in which those from Consumer Reports have the way in which the signal strength decreases when it is "held wrong", but the truth is that Apple reported the same "decrease" of 20db in signal strength when the antennas are connected.

To even reasonably run a scientific test, the iPhone should have been sitting on a non-metallic pedestal inside an anechoic chamber. The base station simulator should have been also sitting outside the chamber and had a calibrated antenna plumbed to it from inside the chamber.

I have not seen (update: I have seen the full video since yesterday afternoon) CR's claim directly that the finger effect reduces the iPhones sensitivity by 20db as reported elsewhere, but unless CR connected to a functional point inside the iPhone that number is fantasy. Even the way they seem to have tested the change – by varying the base station simulator levels – seems to assume the iPhone receiver and/or transmitter operate in a linear fashion (the same way) across all signal strengths – bad assumption.

In short, this engineer qualifies the tests done by Consumer Reports as being done in an uncontrolled environment and in an unprofessional way, as the rest of the blogs have done so far. Maybe he's right, maybe not, it's certain that Apple loses a lot through this passive attitude and I for one believe that at the moment there are already plans in motion to solve the problems but in the most "quiet" way possible.

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3 COMMENTS

  2. As long as these signal losses exist and have been reported by a very large number of users, I don't really care how professionally the test was done. It seems that the problem is still found in 4.1 beta, which confirms that it is a hardware problem and not a software one. I'm starting to think that iPhone 4 is not worth buying. Has anyone tested it in Romania? Can anyone confirm these signal losses? At the prices that our "merchants" ask on Okazii, this option is automatically excluded. Until now I bought a 2g (February 2008) and a 3gs (July 2009) from Okazii and I didn't have any problems, the prices were reasonable (around 500 Euro/piece) but now I wouldn't risk paying anymore double for a phone to use as an iPod. The only option remains the purchase from Orange.