iPhone 3G - Which Do You Want First, The Good News Or Bad?

August 15, 2008

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Let’s start with the good.  The new iPhone 3G has been a smash success, selling to packed stores and long lines.  On top of that, the iTunes App store has sold over $30 million worth of iPhone applications in the first 30 days of sales.  To add to this frenzy, Best Buy stores will start selling iPhones beginning September 7th, just in time for the iPhone to be the hot must have item of the holiday season. 

If it looks like the iPhone is the goose which lays the golden eggs for Apple, others see it as just laying an egg - a rotten one at that.  Reports of dropped calls, frozen phones, and slow data speeds are popping up everywhere.  This reporter has watched as the iPhone 3G shows few if any bars of coverage when other AT&T phones in the same location have full coverage.

I took my iPhone into an Apple store last night to confirm that my phone was behaving as normal prior to writing this post.  At the time, my phone was showing just one bar of coverage in the store.  the iPhones of other shoppers in the same store ranged from full coverage to two bars.  The tech who helped me suggested the following three things to help with the reception:

1) Disable the 3G .  I’m sorry, but did you just tell me to disable the network that you named the phone after?   I disabled the 3G.

2) Delete some of your apps. What?  Downloading apps is fun and is part of what makes the phone so interesting and useful.  But I did as instructed and deleted about half of my apps.  I now have 6 apps on the phone.

3) When signal strength gets bad, shut down and restart the phone.  Did I miss a memo, is the iPhone powered by Windows?  But I did.

Drum roll please . . .  I now have full coverage on my phone at home and at work when just two days ago I only had one bar.  Perhaps the problem is software related, or 3G network related, or both - but keeping your phone free of too many apps and switching to the Edge network if the 3G isn’t responding well can really help.  And if that doesn’t work, shut down and restart your phone or restore it from your iTunes.

One thing is for sure, Apple needs to resolve these issues.  Eventually the hordes of people lining up to buy iPhones will be replaced by hordes of people lining up to return them.

Written by Todd · Filed Under Featured, Mobile 

Comments

3 Responses to “iPhone 3G - Which Do You Want First, The Good News Or Bad?”

  1. Tim on August 19th, 2008 12:13 am

    You disabled the 3G - that’s what did it.

    UMTS (3G) is a different frequency than 2G.

    You will get totally different signal strengths on 2G than you will on 3G. They are separate radio networks. They are of course all tied together nicely to appear as the one big network.

    Your post is similar to saying “I switched from UHF/Analog to digital and I get better results” :)

    Turn your 3G back on, you’ll see the bars dip.

  2. Dustin on September 9th, 2008 3:11 pm

    Me too. I turned off the 3G and it improved my coverage. But the problem IS still the phone. It should do a better job of switching back and forth between networks. The Apple update last month, didn’t fix this problem for me.

  3. Todd on September 12th, 2008 10:54 am

    ZDnet has a nice update on the new 2.1 firmware for the iPhone.

    http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/wp-trackback.php?p=2259

    So far, so good. My phone seems to be performing better already. Hopefully they coverage and battery issues have been resolved.

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