Two possibilities come to mind: 1) Apple realizes its antenna problems are due to an internal control issue so they fired a few iPhone/iPad antenna engineers, or 2) Apple was missing this type of expertise to begin with.
Kristena Hansen at the Los Angeles Times writes this about Apple:
The company, which is under fire for reception problems with its newest iPhone model and its iPad tablet computer, has posted three openings on its website for jobs described as “Antenna Engineer-iPad/iPhone.”
…
The posts are dated June 23, the day before the launch of the iPhone 4, which customers have been complaining loses signal when held in certain ways that seem to interfere with the device’s antenna.
Should you just skip Apple’s iPhone 4 and wait for the iPhone 5?
Truly disappointing leak from Apple. Even worse than Steve Jobs’ “You’re holding it wrong” remark.
Boy Genius reports on Apple’s leak:
- Keep all of the positioning statements in the BN handy – your tone when delivering this information is important.
a. The iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped. Our testing shows that iPhone 4’s overall antenna performance is better than iPhone 3GS.
b. Gripping almost any mobile phone in certain places will reduce its reception. This is true of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, and many other phones we have tested. It is a fact of life in the wireless world.
c. If you are experiencing this on your iPhone 3GS, avoid covering the bottom-right side with your hand.
d. If you are experiencing this on your iPhone 4, avoid covering the black strip in the lower-left corner of the metal band.
e. The use of a case or Bumper that is made out of rubber or plastic may improve wireless performance by keeping your hand from directly covering these areas.
- Do not perform warranty service. Use the positioning above for any customer questions or concerns.
- Don’t forget YOU STILL NEED to probe and troubleshoot. If a customer calls about their reception while the phone is sitting on a table (not being held) it is not the metal band.
- ONLY escalate if the issue exists when the phone is not held AND you cannot resolve it.
- We ARE NOT appeasing customers with free bumpers – DON’T promise a free bumper to customers.
Potential upside to the iPhone 4 antenna debacle coming this Monday in the form of iOS 4.01?
Readers report that Apple’s tech support forums originally confirmed that a iOS 4.0.1 software fix addressing the issue would ship early next week (as early as Monday), before the comments were subsequently taken down along with all the other related discussion about the matter.–Daniel Eran Dilger, AppleInsider.com
Cisco couldn’t have timed this announcement any better with the Apple iPad now flying off retailer shelves to the tune of 3 million in 80 days.
Cisco announced their plans to release an Android powered tablet computer that could shake up the iPad’s death grip on portable PC markets:
Cisco Cius is an ultra-portable device weighing just 1.15lbs (0.52kg) that extends the productivity benefits of Cisco collaboration applications to a highly secure mobile platform. In addition to full telepresence interoperability, Cisco Cius offers HD video streaming and real-time video, multi-party conferencing, email, messaging, browsing, and the ability to produce, edit and share content stored locally or centrally in the cloud.
The Cisco Cius includes specs missing on the first gen iPad such as an HD display port, USB ports and front-mounted 720p HD camera.
A couple of already obvious caveats: 1) the Cius’ planned launch date which isn’t until the first part of 2011 and 2) no target price range.
Could this be a machine for the masses, competing head-to-head with the iPad. Or, will Cisco roll out the Cius as an [expensive] business unified communications solution.
It’s said and done now, but really, shame on Twitter. These are just some painfully obvious and blatant information assurance mistakes. And to consider these security errors occurred on a massive lifestreaming site such as Twitter. Unthinkable.
The FTC:
According to the FTC’s complaint, Twitter was vulnerable to these attacks because it failed to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized administrative control of its system, including:
requiring employees to use hard-to-guess administrative passwords that are not used for other programs, websites, or networks;
prohibiting employees from storing administrative passwords in plain text within their personal e-mail accounts;
suspending or disabling administrative passwords after a reasonable number of unsuccessful login attempts;
providing an administrative login webpage that is made known only to authorized persons and is separate from the login page for users;
enforcing periodic changes of administrative passwords by, for example, setting them to expire every 90 days;
restricting access to administrative controls to employees whose jobs required it; and
imposing other reasonable restrictions on administrative access, such as by restricting access to specified IP addresses.
It’s easy to overlook information security basics such as what the FTC found Twitter had done. But seriously, these steps listed above are not that painstaking to take care of. This should be a lesson-learned for all folks attached to the IT industry.
Google Voice, known previously as GrandCentral, has finally gone live and is accepting sign-ups, but with one caveat: Google Voice is still limited to folks in the USA.
Google Voice Product Managers, Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet:
Over the past year, we’ve introduced a mobile web app, an integrated voicemail player in Gmail, the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number and more. Over a million of you are now actively using Google Voice, and many of the features released over the past year (like SMS to email and our Chrome extension) came as a result of your suggestions, so thanks!
Google Voice is just a great straightforward move by Google that plugs in yet another valuable piece to their unified communications suite. It’s interesting as well to note that in Google’s infographic , Google Voice shows up as a milestone separate from and ‘following’ a VoIP milestone. What’s the message there?
Jay Hathaway from DOWNLOADSQUAD:
Google Docs continues to make the case for dumping your desktop work apps, this time with a useful new text recognition feature that converts PDFs or images into plain, editable text. This new OCR feature — that’s optical character recognition — is quite accurate, and worked pretty well on some old college textbooks scans I had laying around on my hard drive.
Google just simply will not relent in their pursuit of taking over office productivity via the web. This new OCR gem is not just another nice-to-have option you might find lurking around the Google Labs. This is nothing shy of a must-have office productivity power tool. How about Scanning, forwarding, storing and manipulating all that paper in your filing cabinets? Or those office policy documents from pre-Commodore 64 era that you are looking to upgrade the letterhead on?
Well now is your chance.
Privacy has long been a problem for social networking sites and the internet in general. Well now it looks like private industry is getting prepped to lead a charge in correcting this wrong.
Wall Street Journal’s Pui-Wing Tam and Ben Worthen write:
As privacy snafus mount across companies such as Facebook Inc. and AT&T Inc., venture capitalists have spotted a new market opening and are pumping millions of dollars into privacy-related start-ups.
This new ‘privacy’ sector within social networking couldn’t be more timely. The potential benefits are plainly obvious for all of us who surf the web.
A new movement like this could set precedence and possibly ignite a more significant push for legislation aimed at protecting privacy across the internet.
Think these tech start-ups will succeed?
Google has taken yet another bold step in opening up their services with GoogleCL.
GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs.
Not quite sure if GoogleCL streamlines Google services for the novice user, but it certainly brings significant advantages to the intermediate and advanced folks.
Here are some example scripts from Google Code:
Read the full story …
A much anticipated upgrade from Matt-and-Team. WordPress 3.0 is live.
Matt Mullenweg writes:
Arm your vuvuzelas: WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard).
Anyone need a blog, or two? Let us hear your thoughts on how you would employ WP3.0.
Apple strikes again with their monopolistic censorship of yet another app. We’re not talking about hardcore porn here either. This is a comic strip.
Miracle Jones over at the fiction circus:
Conventional publishers published books that they liked and were ready to defend. The new, digital corporate publishers go for volume and want to put out the most innocuous, anodyne, and digestible products possible.
WHY IS APPLE SO AFRAID OF THE EROTIC POSSIBILITIES OF MULTITOUCH? WHAT DO THEY KNOW THAT WE DON’T KNOW?
If you can read it in a book, why can’t you read it on your iPhone. Just another Apple ‘kerfuffle.’
