AT&T LTE No Service: Too many LTE iPhone 5 users?

UPDATE It’s actually having trouble holding “4G” signal now. A lot of times it now shows a few bars, but not data icon; no E, no 4G, just blank. When it does show 4G, the data isn’t actually working half the time.

UPDATE 2 Ooops… Girlfriend’s iPhone 5 was working normally at my house and then realized I had not tried a reboot. Short story short, LTE is working again. Also, got like 5 voice mails from earlier this morning.

UPDATE 3 [10.23.2012] Apparently something weird is going on. I’ve had to reset my phone at least once a week since I’ve had it because of this issue. Maybe it’s a software glitch in iOS 6? Hopefully it’s fixed when iOS 6.0.1 comes out.

If you read my previous post, you know that I got my iPhone 5 preorder in NYC instead of at home in Miami. It worked great on LTE for the afternoon (12:30 – 8:30PM) I was in Manhattan that Friday. Then it worked well on over the weekend in Long Island on 3G (AT&T 4G) for the 3G service. When I returned home to Miami the following Monday, it worked pretty well on LTE, just not hitting the same speeds as NYC. That started to change for the worse in the last few days.

Yesterday alone I noticed on at least 5 occasions where my iPhone 5 would go to No Service. After about 30-60 seconds it would come back on. Not sure how many times it did this I when I was looking at the phone.  This happen while at home on WIFI, so didn’t affect me much, but wasn’t a good sign. Today was even worse, in addition to the 5+ No Service occasions, even when showing I had service I was having trouble getting messages through. I wasn’t on WIFI and was about 10 minutes from home, so they started sending as text messages instead of iMessage…even then some send as text messages failed.

My gut is telling me as more and more iPhone 5 users come on board, the AT&T LTE towers are getting hit hard, overloaded, and dropping connections. My LTE worked much better right after returning home, but now a week later it’s starting to turn bad. Yes, I know there are other LTE phones already on the market, but all these new LTE iPhone 5′s could be the straw breaking AT&Ts backbone. This should get better as AT&T converts more and more towers to support LTE. I’m confident that there are still a lot of 3G (AT&T 4G) only towers (at least in Miami) as I’ve actually been able to get faster speeds on occasion with LTE turned off. Most likely because the LTE tower is further away than the 3G, as suggested by Brian Klug in response to me on Twitter:

@justin_horn different bands, different path loss, different cell sites entirely most likely.

I’m going to turn off my LTE service on my phone for the next few days and see how it goes, but I have a feeling it will go back to my good “4G” service I had on my iPhone 4S.

How is LTE holding up in your city on AT&T?

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at&t, iPhone 5, Speculation

Multitouch improved on iOS 6

UPDATE 2 Looks like we now have the biggest reason for this change, the iPad mini.

I noticed recently that multitiouch on iOS 6 beta seems to have improved, it now recognizes a second finger touch. On iOS 5 a touch with a second finger while the first finger was still on the screen would ignore all input from the second finger.  After noticing this improvement, I double checked I wasn’t crazy by testing this on my girlfriend’s iPhone 4 with iOS 5 (don’t feel too bad, I’m getting her an iPhone 5 soon)  and it worked as I remembered. I haven’t tested on a 4S with iOS 5 since noticing this, but I’m pretty confident this is a software related, not hardware.

Hoping that this is the first step to bringing multitouch gestures to the iPhone.

UPDATE Just to clarify a little more, this is different than the previously usable multitouch gestures, like pinch to zoom. This is basically recognizing two simultaneous inputs doing non-gestures. Like in my demo video below, just a regular swipe up and down. You can also see when I bring the two fingers towards each other the slide up and down cancels out.

Here’s a short video demonstrating what I mean by multiple touch inputs.

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Featured post, iOS 6, iPhone, Speculation

Facebook iOS app overhaul to be built by former Apple employees?

About a month ago New York Times Bits heard rumors that Facebook was working on a completely new, real iOS app. Not just an app pulling in HTML5 webpages through an app frontend. The rumor is now heating up, according to a report by Value Walk:

According to sources, Facebook Inc has hired a team of former Apple Inc. employees to completely redesign the Facebook iPhone app. These sources say, the app will get a “major code overhaul” rather than the normal update.

I was happy that Facebook was updating their app, but if this report is true, it’s even better than I thought. Who better to fix this broken app than former Apple employees?

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Facebook, iOS, iOS apps, Speculation

I still don’t think the 2012 iPhone will have a 4 inch screen, maybe 3.85 inches

Seth Weintraub of 9to5Mac got a tip from a Foxconn employee discussing some new iPhone prototypes:

The source said various sample devices are also floating around (they vary slightly from one another), so it is impossible to tell which one will be the final. Some things in common with all of them, however, are:

• 4+ inch display (made by LG on at least one of them).
• No teardrop-shaped devices, as rumored in the lead up to the iPhone 4S. Samples so far have been symmetrical in thickness (also longer/wider).
• Neither of the sample devices have the iPhone 4/4S form factor.
• Neither of the devices are the final versions.

Also:

 If we follow patterns and give a five month-ish lead time, it would appear that Apple is back on its new iPhone launch for summer

Most people I’ve spoken to, mostly on Twitter, seem to think the iPhone will, at least for the 2012 version, be on a fall release like the iPhone 4S. I’ve always thought the iPhone 4S was “delayed” and the 2012 iPhone would come out in the normal summer June / July release schedule, more likely July.  So I agree with this part of the rumor.

UPDATE John Gruber chimes in, saying that production hasn’t started. Even though I trust Gruber’s sources, I still don’t think we’ll have to wait till October for the next iPhone.

I also agree that the teardrop shape is not going to happen.  It just doesn’t seem to fit with the direction Apple is going. I could be wrong, but I hope not.

Now onto that 4 inch screen. This is not going to happen. The first, although maybe not the most obvious, reason was brought to my attention last year by Dustin Curtis’s 3.5 Inches post:

Touching the upper right corner of the screen on the Galaxy S II using one hand, with its 4.27-inch screen, while you’re walking down the street looking at Google Maps, is extremely difficult and frustrating. I pulled out my iPhone 4 to do a quick test, and it turns out that when you hold the iPhone in your left hand and articulate your thumb, you can reach almost exactly to the other side of the screen. This means it’s easy to touch any area of the screen while holding the phone in one hand, with your thumb. It is almost impossible to do this on the Galaxy S II.

Another great point, brought up by John Gruber in his post regarding the iPhone 4S event:

Apple decided on the optimal size for an iPhone display back in 2006. If they thought 4-inches was better, overall, as the one true size for the iPhone display, then the original iPhone would have had a 4-inch display. It’s not like 4-inch screens are harder to make, or use some sort of new technology. If anything they’re surely easier to make, as the pixels are less dense.

Now onto my more boring technical point that has been brought up before, but really does seem to be a very logical reason for not going to 4 inches, the retina display. The current iPhone screen is 3.5 inches diagonal. Well, it’s actually 9 cm (3.54 inches), which is why I had trouble figuring out how Apple got to a pixel density of 326 ppi.  Let’s see what happens when we increase the size to 4 inches using a formula from Wikipedia: Pixel Density.

First we calculate the diagonal resolution in pixels.

Then use that to determine the PPI.

dp = sqrt(960^2 + 640^2) = 1153.776

PPI iPhone 4/4S 3.5″ Screen = 1153.776 / 3.53 = 325.926

PPI 4.0″ Screen = 1153.776 / 4.0 = 288.444

According to Steve Jobs magic number for retina display, 300ppi, the 4 inch screen falls short. Can you imagine the press backlash if they still call this 288ppi screen a retina display? A term coined by Apple? It won’t happen.

So now you’re thinking, they can just squeeze in some more pixels, just like they did when first going to the retina display. Yes, they probably could bump up the pixels to something like 1024 x 682, but do you think they would want to require app developers to make a third set of graphics, for a 5-10% improvement in quality. I also doubt Apple, a details oriented company, would want to stretch all the current graphics even 1% to achieve this mythical 4 inch screen.

UPDATE Also in John Gruber’s “chime in“, he says:

Longer and wider? Sounds like bullshit. I can see Apple putting a bigger display on a device of the same size. I can’t see them making a bigger device.

I agree. I think the next iPhone would be smaller and lighter if anything. Also, I could see Apple increasing the size up to about 3.85 inches which, at the same resolution of 960 x 640, holds to the minimum 300ppi needed for retina display. This also plays into iPhone 5 rumors last year, where the screen went all the way to the edge of the iPhone shell, for a small screen size increase.

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iPhone, Speculation

One thing I do right on this blog, iPhone 4S 1080p video storage predictions [Confirmed]

I recently predicted the iPhone 4S 1080p video storage “requirements”.

Turns out (surprise!!!) I was right.

Jim Dalrymple from The Loop responded to my Tweet asking about real world 4S video size (he’s famous enough to get a review unit…but not too famous to talk to small time bloggers via Twitter):

Me: @jdalrymple how close am I to the 1080p files size for the 4S? [Link to the above link ^]

Jim Dalrymple: @justin_horn 4:33 of video is 814.2MB

Doing some math…give me a minute (or 178.9MB) here… comes out to…

178.95 MB/Min actual vs my estimate of 177.98 MB/Min.

I say…close enough.

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iPhone, iPhone 4S, Speculation

Apple Television Set?

DailyTech:

According to the source Apple plans to “blow Netflix and all those other guys away” by bundling Apple TV + iTunes inside physical television sets.  According to the source Apple is teaming up with a major supplier (our guess would be Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.), to provide the physical televisions, which will be rebranded as Apple television sets.

I used to have this in the same rumor bin as the iPhone nano, so a few months ago when a friend told me Apple Television sets were coming out in this year, I just nodded and said, “we’ll see”. I hadn’t read any rumors about an Apple Television set at all and that made it even more far fetched. There were rumors flying around for years about an Apple tablet before the iPad was unveiled.

He said an acquaintance (not sure if it’s a family friend or what, it was a while ago and don’t remember the details) that works for Apple told him about it. I told him the Apple retail employees don’t know anything about unreleased products, but he said it was someone on a higher pay grade. Since then I haven’t really thought about it much.

Now after reading this, I’m starting to come around. Guess I’ll have to see if my friend can get any more info out of this “source”.

(via modmyi)

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Apple TV, Apple TV Set, Speculation