Uh-oh! Just when the better-than-expected preliminary sales estimates for the Apple [AAPL] iPhone 3G were bandied about, rumblings about reception problems with iPhone 3G began to resurface, reaching a somewhat-boiling point yesterday. On the release day for the new iteration of the iPhone, there was the dramatic activation-related outage in the U.S. at the Apple servers; that was followed by MobileMe service outages.
Maybe this is a case of bad things coming in threes. Earlier today, a GigaOM post describing a financial analyst’s belief that the Infineon [IFX] 3G transmission chipset included in the iPhone 3G is the cause of the erratic reception issues was released, to mixed responses.
Is the Infineon 3G chip in question actually buggy? How many product batches are impacted? Why aren’t every iPhone 3G owner impacted the same way? Any word from AT&T [T] or Apple on the network impact?
It seems that, unlike the Sprint/Verizon networks, the AT&T GSM network needs to bear the weight of both voice and data transmissions, and given the spotty 3G data coverage available, this most likely also plays a role in reception issues. Obviously, wireless reception problems are not new: in the past, serious problems with Marvell and Broadcom wireless chipsets have posed signal problems for owners of WiFi devices built with them. However, given the widespread nature of the impacted network, sufficient levels of testing in the wild will be tricky, to put it mildly. Closed testing for something of this nature is extremely difficult as well, so what’s a tech company to do, hmm?
N.B.
Om Malik mentioned his frustrations with his iPhone 3G. Of course, a lot of folks who weren’t able to get the iPhone 3G to try it out have voiced their opinions that, if given the chance to own their own, they’d probably be quite happy with it anyway. It’s always a tough call.
Even before the release of the iPhone 3G, several commentaries have appeared that cited less-than-stellar features included in the smartphone, or just missing altogether (like this post). Assuming Apple is definitely out to create the all-in-one super-everything computing-multimedia tiny-format communicator device, this would make sense… sorta. But then again, like many other Apple products, there’s a certain target audience, and everybody else is just gravy.
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