How Bumpers Solve iPhone 4′s Signal Issue

Steve Jobs just said at the iPhone 4 press event that the bumpers solve all the signal problems iPhone 4 has got. And Apple is giving away free iPhone 4 cases as a remedy to the problem. Let gggadgets.com explain how the bumpers actually solve the problem.

Bumpers Solve

Provided the network problems of the iPhones, Apple decided to increase iPhone 4′s signal reception capabilities. They were already making the form factor of the iPhone 4 similar to the iPad. Which included the metallic inner frame. So they decided to connect the antenna with the metal frame, making the whole frame (or a part of it) a bigger antenna. This is apparently a nice solution but it actually is not.

iPhone 4 Inner Frame

I assume you remember your 5th grade science lesson about ‘charge’, specifically the ‘static charge’. I wont’t explain it here. What I want to tell that almost everything has a static charge on it. Our hands have it more than other things. It is not there by default but our hands get charged when we rub them against different things. Like paper, wood, plastic and cloth. Haven’t you experience a tiny little ‘tik’ when you touch a metal in a hot summer day? Or when you rub your hands against a woolen cloth in the winter? Yes, this is because of static charge your hands have got. How that relates to the iPhone 4? When you grip your iPhone 4′s metal frame with your hands, the static charge from your hands shifts to the metal frame and it also gets the static charge. Now the metal frame is charged and is unable to perform its function of catching the signals. It is like connecting your TV antenna to a power source or touching your TV’s antenna to a AA battery. When you touch your TV’s antenna with a charged device like the AA cell, the TV’s screen goes mad because the antenna is unable to catch the signals any more. So what’s the deal with the bumper? The bumper or the case is made up of plastic or silicon, protecting the inner frame. When you have a bumer or a case covering the metal frame (which is actually the antenna), your hand does not come in contact with it. No static charge is transfered and no signals are dropped.

I am not alone on this argument, one of the most famous iPhone hacker @GeoHot also explains the phenomenon the same way:

the outside metal s*** are grounded, when you touch it the capacitance goes crazy, sucks for antennas.

Capacitance is all about charge. These are just comprehensive words for what I explained above. Will Steve Jobs’ solutions of bigger signal bars work for such a hardware related issue? No way!