On New iPhone, a Mystery of Dropped Calls

SAN FRANCISCO — For iPhone owners, it always comes back to the antenna.

Apple’s touch-screen smartphone has been a sensation since Day 1 three years ago, and many who own the device believe it to be almost perfect — if only it worked better as a phone.

So it is not surprising that as the first boxes of the new iPhone 4 landed in the hands of the earliest adopters late Wednesday, the antenna’s reception quickly became an Internet obsession. What surprised many of them: the precious little bars that signal network connections inexplicably disappeared when they cradled the phone in their hands a particular way. Sometimes, but not always, the cradling resulted in dropped calls.

In the hours before Apple weighed in on the problem, iPhone fans turned to one another on the Internet in a zealous exercise in crowd-sourcing for answers to the mystery.

They were all the more baffled because the iPhone 4 was designed to have better reception. A metal band that wraps around the edges of the device is supposed to pull in a stronger signal; software is supposed to choose the section of the signal with the least congestion.

A user calling himself FFArchitect appeared to be the first to report the phenomenon on MacRumors.com, a site for the Apple-obsessed. He said that touching the band in various places caused reception problems. His report, like many that followed, included a video demonstrating the problem.

Soon after, Gizmodo, a popular site for gadget fans, picked up on it, calling the phenomenon “weird.”

“When the guy holds the iPhone in his hands, touching the outside antenna band in two places, he drops reception,” Jesus Diaz, a writer for the blog, said. “Placing the phone down gets him 4 bars.”

From then on, report after report began to ricochet across technology Web sites, and Mr. Diaz posted updates as new stories from around the Web dropped into his in-box. “This is worrying,” Mr. Diaz wrote.

One commenter linked to an article from early this month about a Danish expert in radio antennas who predicted that touching the antenna would affect reception. Another update claimed to narrow down the problem to touching the lower left side of the phone.

The reader reports included suggestions for how to fix the problem — Update 19: use nail polish to insulate the antenna; Update 21: enclose the phone in a rubber case — and appeared to show some wisdom in this crowd. Late Thursday, an Apple spokesman, Steve Dowling, acknowledged that the issues experienced by users were real but he played down their importance.

“Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, depending on the placement of the antennas,” he said. “This is a fact of life for every wireless phone.”

Mr. Dowling declined to say whether Apple experienced the issue during testing of the phone and suggested that users not hold the phone in a way that covers both sides of a small black strip on the lower left side. Alternatively, he said, they could use one of many available cases.

Analysts and investors did not appear overly worried.

“Apple has not had one introduction that hasn’t had issues,” said Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company. “Sometimes these things get blown out of proportion.”

On Wall Street, shares of Apple slid a mere 0.8 percent, faring better than the broad Nasdaq index, which dropped 1.6 percent.

And given the long lines outside Apple stores in New York heat, Chicago rain and San Francisco fog, consumers appeared unconcerned by, or unaware of, the potential reception issues.

Even Brian Lam, Gizmodo’s editorial director, saw an upside to the iPhone 4, antenna problems and all. “We are paying attention to the antenna issue because it could be a big deal,” he said.

But Mr. Lam said that for years, he had not been able to use older iPhones to make calls from his home. That changed on Thursday, after he bought an iPhone 4. “I have made three hours of calls today,” he said. (Resource from nytimes.com)

In Week of Tests, Obama Reasserts His Authority

After two months in which an oil gusher seemed to underscore the limits of his powers, President Obama spent the last week trying to reassert control over a triumvirate of forces that almost always test a new president’s authority: the military, the markets and the lobbyists.
Mr. Obama’s much-needed victories, nearly a year and a half into a presidency that was saddled from the start by two wars and a terrifying financial plunge, may not prove to be lasting.

His firing of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal for what appeared to be an attitude of disrespect and disdain for the civilian chain of command does not make success in Afghanistan any more likely. The financial regulatory bill that was agreed upon in Congress on Friday reverses two decades of increasingly blind faith in the ability of financial markets to regulate themselves, but few think it will stop Wall Street’s constant effort to route around Washington in pursuit of profits.

Still, add those together with the use of raw presidential power to force BP to set up a $20 billion fund for victims of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the conclusion is unmistakable. George Bush and Dick Cheney may have left the White House, but the argument for an extraordinarily strong executive lives on.

“This is a clear respite from the theme that Obama had lost control,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official who wrote the definitive history of the National Security Council, the organization American presidents have used for 60 years to assert authority around the country and the world. “He sent a loud and clear message to the generals about who is in charge. And he has engineered a pivot-point in U.S. economic history, an end, or at least a big change, to the ‘leave it to the markets’ era.”

The White House certainly has an enormous interest in portraying Mr. Obama as a president who has grown comfortable with his powers and is unafraid to exercise them. They conceded that Mr. Obama had no legal basis to force BP to create the $20 billion fund; they said he was making a moral argument, and used the jawboning power of the presidential pulpit to push the company.

One top national security aide noted to a reporter on Wednesday that the decision to oust General McChrystal and replace him with Gen. David A. Petraeus was “considered, decided and executed in less than 36 hours” and sent a message that the president would not tolerate what he called “division” in the ranks of his team after he had set strategy.

And the financial regulatory bill, they argued, got stronger in the last few weeks, leading Mr. Obama to boast at the White House that it was “the toughest financial reform since the one we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression.”

He can rightly claim that the bill actually got stronger as it worked its way through Congress rather than having the legislation eroded as one lobbyist after another found a way to carve exceptions. (The exception to that rule was the handling of derivatives, a business the banks get to keep, even if they have to operate under new restrictions.)

“I think we used this week or so not only for a reassertion of executive authority, but as an demonstration that, when presidential power is judiciously applied, you can get a lot done,” said Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, who argued for a more confrontational approach to BP and for General McChrystal’s ouster. He described financial reform legislation as one of five pillars of “a new foundation” for the economy, after the stimulus package, the health care overhaul and the re-engineering of college aid. (The fifth, an energy bill, may prove the hardest.)

Yet Mr. Rothkopf and even some of the president’s aides caution against confusing short-term reassertion of authority with a long-term ability to shape events. Wars and markets have a curious way of taking on a momentum of their own. With his victories this week, Mr. Obama owns, even more than before, America’s future in Afghanistan and the government’s running war to rein in big market players without squashing innovation or growth.

The messy encounter with General McChrystal forced Mr. Obama to reassert his faith in a strategy in Afghanistan (a troop surge, a counterinsurgency strategy that exposes American forces to significant danger, and the eventual transfer of recaptured territory to Afghan government hands) that so far has shown little signs of working. The left remains deeply apprehensive about his growing commitment to the war; the right argues that his 18-month deadline to begin withdrawing troops is a sign of absence of commitment.

When Mr. Obama declared, “I welcome debate, but I won’t tolerate division,” it amounted to an unspoken acknowledgment that his national security team remained split, and never really ended the argument over whether the current approach to the war was the right one. Even without General McChrystal, the argument seems bound to flare again in December, when it is up for a major review.

The financial reform bill was a different expression of presidential influence and power and a bill Mr. Obama clearly wanted in his pocket before he left Friday for Canada and his third meeting of the Group of 20 nations, the organization that has risen in power largely because of the financial crisis.

At the first G-20 in his presidency in London last year, Mr. Obama got an earful about how lax American regulation was responsible for the huge lapses in judgment and the greed that prompted the crisis. He promised changes that would directly address the causes of the 2008 collapse, but when the health care debate diverted Congress, many foreign officials said during visits to Washington that they feared the reforms would wither, just as they had in past crises.

Mr. Obama insisted on a series of consumer protections that would assure government regulation of, say, subprime mortgages even if the loans were not issued by a bank. (Countrywide Financial, one of the biggest offenders in the subprime market, was not a bank and thus not subject to the usual rules.)

He got that, but the regulatory powers do not rest with the president himself. The bill relies more on the powers of the Fed and independent boards, insulating Mr. Obama a bit from the argument that he has centered more regulatory power in the White House.

Mr. Obama must now make the argument that he is serious about enforcement and that if regulations are to work in a global economy, banks around the globe will have to adhere to the same regulations. Otherwise, evading the new American rules will pose little challenge to financial institutions that have learned long ago the art of crossing borders to take new risks. (resource from nytimes.com)