When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4, admittedly a jaw dropping design of a mobile device, he talked about its antenna, part of the chassis of the device, calling it ‘really cool engineering’. What Steve Jobs, meant to say was ‘great design’, for the iPhone 4 antennæ are likely one of the worst engineering examples possible in a mobile device. It’s hard to have accurate explanations without circuit schematics — or an actual iPhone 4 — but touching the antenna might very well ‘detune’ it — fingers act as picofarad capacitors and for those frequencies they can mess things up considerably for the driving circuits; touching both antennæ might also have unpredictable results to both subsystems of the iPhone, although the issues seem to be there even when you simply touch the ‘left’ antenna.

It is bewildering why Apple engineering didn’t figure this out, but it wouldn’t be the first time they mess up something big like that. Apple has undoubtedly great engineering and amazing industrial design, yet being a pioneer comes at an expense and Apple has already dropped the ball too many times already in the past ten years: the flakey Titanium Powerbook coating, the original iPod battery charging issue, the unbelievable PowerMac G4 MDD noise, the pitting issues on early Aluminium Powerbooks, various issues (and subsequent recalls) with iBook motherboards, the PowerMac G5 Quad coolant leaks, the flakey white Macbook coating among others.

The list goes on, but one thing is certain: the iPhone 4 is a world-class device that will most probably succeed no matter what. Unless annoyed users become a really loud nuissance and hurt sales, Jobs and Co. will quietly fix it for iPhone 5 and those using the iPhone 4 will have to suffice to using a malfunctioning, badly engineered iPhone 4 and a blunt recommendation to “not hold it this way or get a case”. Sad, but that’s how Apple has been operating for years, even when it was much weaker financially, so there’s no surprise there.

Update: This could be due to a few faulty batches, as some people have reported that they don’t have any issues with their new iPhone 4s. It could also, in theory, be remedied through smart software management of the radios.

Update 2: Apple has responded! They claim it was a software error in the signal strength calculation that has been identified and corrected. If that’s the case it’s certainly good news for iPhone 4 owners. Sadly, I don’t think it’s a simple as they make it out to be — there seems to be a genuine, albeit minor, flaw in the hardware design.

Android is out and it seems pretty well designed. This is the first of what’s hopefully going to be a series of articles covering Android from cosmix.org. It’s also going to be the least technical in nature as I haven’t had much time to play around with it and also because introductions should rarely be too technical, anyway. Before we start, take a few minutes to watch the following video. It will provide a pretty informative quick glance as to how applications look on Android prototypes.

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Mac OS X took the unassimilated, thinking and computer-literate world by storm since its release on the 24th of March 2001. Its combination of commercial, high quality software applications, a state-of-the-art, ever-evolving and well thought out desktop environment and the solid Unix underpinnings that came with NeXT’s acquisition, gave it a significant part of its ‘holy-grail’ appeal that has so far eluded both the Classic Mac OS, Microsoft’s clone thereof and more recent efforts for desktop evolution on linux.

Yet, besides the æsthetics and usability aspects as well as the appeal that OS X may have on the general population, it is a technically very interesting engineering and `cultural’ feat, as it represents the amalgamation of a number of previously seemingly orthogonal (or incompatible if you prefer) technologies, ironically offering a largely complementary set of features: the stability, security and familiarity of FreeBSD, the object oriented driver model of NeXT, the once-promising-often-dismissed microkernel Mach, the legendary ease of use and intuitiveness of the Macintosh. While most people will probably feel right at home and include OS X in their daily computer use routine, without bothering to spend time or money on any of the introductory books directed at the casual user of the OS, there is a significant (and, I feel, ever-increasing) part of the OS X userbase that comes from the adventurous Unix world and is keen on learning the intricate details of the system. It is for this group that Mac OS X Internals was written for. And with more than 1600 pages in 12 chapters, it certainly contains a wealth of information for the curious or technically proficient user.
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