Making the iPhone phone

After my rant about iPhone woes the other day, my buddy Ed sent me a note: “…after you get rid of the I-phone. I love my Macs but would never put up with the mess you keep telling us about. Buying a back up phone, phooey!”

Hmmm. Right after that, when I’d reconnected to her for the third time, a friend said, “You know what? Don’t call me on that thing anymore. Just wait till you get to a landline.”

OK. Something had to be done. AT&T insisted that it wasn’t THEIR fault, it was Apple’s, so I called Apple.

“Oh, my God, Miss Cynthia!!!” said Kim, the Apple support rep, “Your calls being dropped like that, that’s just awful. Horrible. I don’t blame you if you’re really, really angry with us, Miss Cynthia. I would be, and I sooooooooo apologize for that. I just feel terrible about this whole thing! Now, don’t you worry, Miss Cynthia, I’m going to make sure you’re taken care of right away!”

Apparently, Apple support reps receive a lot of sensitivity training.

We did the usual, i.e., we took all the diagnostic steps I’d already taken that hadn’t helped, including shutting down WiFi, resetting the phone, ensuring the latest OS and patches were installed, etc. “Do the dropped calls occur at any particular place, Miss Cynthia?” (i.e., am I just beefing about a deadzone problem?)

“Nope…except for one thing: Whenever I’m driving near an Apple Store (there are three in my area), the calls start breaking up and then die right next to the store,” I explained, “I still have 5 bars on the 3G, so I’m beginning to think the phone’s trying to get back to the mothership.”

“Heeheeee. Good one, Miss Cynthia. I’ll have to send that one around,” said Kim, “But I think your phone may be broken, so I’ll make you an appointment at the GeniusBar. When can you go?”

(GeniusBar, by the way, is the AppleStore service desk. I use them often. They are arguably the best tech support for personal electronics I’ve ever seen and a big reason to spend more money for Apple stuff.)

Sunday morning I arrived for my appointment with Florin-the-Genius, and after some close questioning, a bunch of diagnostics and some test calls (during which time we determined that my call failure rate was about 23 percent–whew!), Florin gave me the bad news: “I don’t think it’s the phone.”

Drat.

“I hate to say it,” he said, “but AT&T is still working on developing its 3G network and it’s got a lot of gaps. When the signal wavers the iPhone 3G doesn’t automatically hand off to the Edge network, it just fails. If you’re driving, you may pass through a low-signal area for just a second, and that’s enough to drop the call. You won’t see it because the signal strength will waver too fast for it to show up on the bars. It happens even in this store, just by walking from the front to the back.”

His recommendation: Kill the 3G network entirely and just use Edge and WiFi. I wasn’t all that surprised–although AT&T vehemently denied that the problem was 3G-related–because 3G is notoriously fickle about dealing with crummy weather and stuff like congestion, especially if the host is stingy with equipment.

So we’re going to try Edge-phoning for a couple of weeks. It didn’t make a difference before but I might not have left it on long enough, so I’ll give it a good long try. If that doesn’t work, Apple will replace the phone, which is a heckuva lot more than AT&T promised. (“Although,” said Florin, “I’m not sure that replacing the phone will make much difference.”)

Geez.

Ah well. No 3G means longer battery life, too, so there’s a silver lining in my 3G cloud. Maybe I can put my backup phone plans on hold. And ignore the Verizon wireless guy smirking in the background.

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