I can say, there is NO WAY I’m returning my iPhone 4! I love it.
By the way Radio Shack..a new iPhone dealer, is offering a 100 to 200 buck trade-in for 3g and 3gs that are in good shape. I'm trading mine in and grandfathering my unlimited data plan (30 bucks a mo) into a new contract for the total of 100 bucks ((16G).
I may have failed to make clear that I was referring to the switch from analog to digital, years ago. Nothing specific to an iPhone.
I think I’ll amplify on my previous mini-rant. Before I do, I should reiterate that I’m discussing the transition from analog to digital cellphones that took place beginning almost twenty years ago. Systems have evolved substantially since then, in order to handle the newer digital services to handheld devices like the iPhone; however, the same basic engineering principles continue to apply, although improved design methodologies (and maybe even a dose of humility on the part of system designers!) may have improved things for the customer.
Now, onward.
Two decades ago or so, the system engineers preparing to switch the various cellular services from analog to digital had at their disposal all manner of mathematical models and computer simulations of system performance.
These models included extensive simulations of propagation effects, including antenna performance of a nominal handheld phone, and also such issues as multipath, co-channel and adjacent channel interference, and many other factors.
The models had many virtual knobs which the engineers could tweak. A couple of the most important ones were bandwidth/data rate and transmit power (both in the phone and in the cell site).
The evaluations of the performance of the models also had numerous dimensions.
For the future customer, the most important of these were the frequency of dropped calls and the intelligibility of speech as received over the simulated system in a “standard” phone.
[[By the way, the telephone industry has well-defined procedures for the rating of speech intelligibilty using carefully prepared experiments with panels of human listeners. Methods have been in place for generations.]]
For the service provider, the most important criteria were how many simultaneous connections could be supported at a time at a cell site given the FCC assigned channels; how wide an area could a cell site be made to cover (where phone traffic was sparse); and how much standby or talk time could a “standard” phone be expected to achieve.
Managment wanted the engineers to maximize capacity in a given bandwidth to minimize the capital cost of a talk channel at a cell site, and to maximize the site’s potential for expansion of the number of channels. A contradictory desire was to maximize battery life of a typical handheld phone (by minimizing the power of its transmitter). So the engineers set to work studying tradeoffs and running many variations through their models (by twiddling all those chromium knobs in the software). At the same time, they had a minimum standard for the frequency of dropped calls and for acceptable voice quality. To improve either of these meant a tradeoff against the phone’s battery life and the number of calls a cell site could handle.
IMHO, they set the quality standards too low; probably because their models contained optimistic assumptions, but possibly also under pressure from managment to maximize channel capacity.
End of rant.