⇥ So many questions on the Consumer Reports iPhone 4 announcement…

As you may have heard, Consumer Reports today decided that it cannot “recommend” the iPhone 4 because it has determined that the widely-reported antenna problem is a hardware issue, rather than a software bug that the company has promised it will fix. I think that their report is a little questionable—at the very least, as far as their claims go, they have some real explaining to do.

Please note: I make no claims of being an expert in electronics, RF interference, etc. etc. If anyone with knowledge wants to pitch in an fill in the gaps, please let me have your comments. I’m also assuming that the video wasn’t staged, because… well, what would be the point?

Isolation what?

The first question I have is: why do they call their testing location a “radio frequency (RF) isolation chamber?” That is such a strange name—so strange, in fact, that I have never heard of it. RF testing is done in what is called an anechoic chamber, which looks nothing like the room they were testing in. An anechoic chamber, which usually looks like this, is almost instantly recognizable because of the structures used to reflect radio waves in such a way as to not create interference; these normally look like a series of cones or spike rising from all sides of the room—if you’ve seen Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, for example, the big hangar at the beginning of the movie is a large anechoic chamber/hangar used by the Air Force.

Incidentally, if you Google “radio frequency isolation chamber,” all the pictures that come up also are of anechoic chambers.

Of course, perhaps instead of an anechoic chamber all that Consumer Reports needed was a Faraday cage, which, if properly set up, will block outside RF interference. However, even Faraday cages have very peculiar looks due to the way they need to be built—and none of them looks like the room shown in the video.

Is that a man I see?

The questions on the CR setup don’t end here. For example, the videos clearly show a man present in the room as the test is being conducted. Unfortunately, humans are not transparent to RF radiation, which may explain why some people are convinced that cell phones are giving us all cancer. Therefore, the human in the video could well be influencing the measurements by just being in the room and moving around.

But it doesn’t end here: there’s also a crapload of equipment in that room and what looks a lot like artificial lighting. I hope they carefully shielded everything before running their tests.

Look, ma, no wires!

The final question I have is this: how does CR detect a “reception” problem without attaching a single wire to the iPhone? If you look carefully at the video, it’s clear that the handset is not connected to any wiring of any kind. How on Earth does CR know that the phone has a problem receiving?

At best, the only thing that they can measure is that the signal emitted by the phone is attenuated as a finger is placed on the antenna—but that’s a transmission problem that couldn’t possibly influence the number of bars shown on the phone, so Apple could still be perfectly correct when they say that they are just calculating the signal level improperly.

It would seem to me that, had CR wanted to actually measure how well the phone receives a signal, they would have had to open it up and plug directly into its antenna.

Is there a problem?

So, does the iPhone 4 have a reception problem? I have no idea—heck, I can’t even buy the damn thing—but there are certainly enough anecdotal reports of something being wrong with it when it’s gripped in a particular way that chances are that the problem exists. It just seems to me that CR’s report is a little iffy—and that they could at least have done a better job of explaining their methodology.