Ever have a problem with a cell phone call and you know what I mean. Your reception fades or you lose the call unexpectedly. There’s so many ways to describe what’s going on and the reasons can vary from excessive cell phone traffic on the cell tower closest to you or inadequate partitioning with your mobile service provider. In the past these were the most common sources of dropped calls and that will continue to happen as our wireless companies upgrade to the new 3G and 4G or LTE standards. Until that day arrives expect lots of the same. Yet an old culprit is here to add to our cell call woes so much so that many of us are thinking back to the days when we had land-lines, which is a good topic to cover in a future post, but that’s not the point here. No, the newest cause du Jour has little to do with the service providers and much more with the interaction of people with their phones, Interference.

So let’s focus on the word for a moment. We all know what it’s like to interfere. If you’re a football fan, you know all about pass interference, that’s when a defender prevents a receiver from catching a fair pass. Well in that way we have a similar problem with our cellular phones. People, us, are getting in the way of our phone calls. Now, in all fairness to us, we’re without fault, mostly. You see, the problem of radio frequency interference is an over simple way of describing what’s really going on because it extends into the aesthetics, economics, and technologies of creating a phone that we love to use and performs to our expectations.

Take aesthetics and Apple’s iPhone 4. You’ve no doubt heard word of mouth reports, maybe read an article like this one, or saw a compelling video that showed what happens when using the phone. If you haven’t then let me describe the problem like this, you take your iPhone 4 and make a call and slowly you lose reception until zip, call dropped. You might initially think like I would that AT&T must be overburdened with lots of calls and from 2000 to 2008 that might have been the case because post 911 the government took up huge amounts of bandwidth in the search for terrorists, but they found none. And at any moment, the government make snatch the airwaves again, but I’m neither anti-government nor a conspiracy hack, it’s just a plain fact that what the man needs, the man takes!

So wait let me get back on topic of looks. You see Apple is famous for eye pleasing designs, owners of any of their PCs will know what I mean. Apple makes products look good with great performance too, right? Well, their driving motivation is to let their industrial (style) designers have a final say in product development. It’s worked so well with their latest iPod, the iPad, and of course the iPhone.

So what do looks have to do with dropped calls?

It’s not an easy answer, but let me try to explain. Embedded inside your cell phone is a snug little circuit board, full of microchips, electronic parts, and antennas for sending and receiving wireless signals. When connected together these little devices allow you and me to make our phone calls. In order to make that happen we need a cell phone circuit designer. That cool designer dude or hip dudette will line up the chips and parts, making them work at their best and if left alone they’ll give you a circuit board that works, but it may be ugly. The problem at Apple is likely that their industrial designers didn’t like the first iPhone 4 circuit. In that first design, the antennas may have been on the back of the phone or on the top or well wherever the circuit designers knew would be out of the way of our hands whenever we made a phone call. But that’s not how design works at Apple. Their industrial designers are about making products that are beautiful inside and out. In the case of the iPhone 4 they symmetrically integrated the antennas into the outer case where we normally put our hands to make a call. We get in the way. The interference – our hands and bodies – block the iPhone 4′s reception. So who’s fault is that? Easy to figure right? Right.

Now take economics. In Apple’s case there a solution. Put the antennas out of the way of us. Problem solved. But that’s not the case with every cell phone maker. Often because of the design, there’s no getting around putting the antennas where we get in the way. What then? Let’s use the football analogy from above again. Most football teams are smart to have more than one receiver out on the football field in the case where a defender is blocking one of the receivers then the quarterback can choose another receiver. Or if they’ve got just one receiver then why not get the tallest and biggest one possible? That way the defenders (blockers) can’t affect him. Well in cellphones it’s possible to use more than one antenna or to make the antenna larger! The concept like in football is called redundancy. Redundancy helps create back up solutions. Here’s where we get into economics. In order to provide a phone that’s got more than one antenna or even a big antenna, the cell phone maker has to spend more on the technologies (antenna, microchips, and electronics). In the end we end up paying more $$$ for that phone. Who wouldn’t mind paying more for better reception? More than 50% of America, that’s who. We like getting our phones for free with a two year contract and if they charge us $100 who cares as long as we get a good phone. Our “who cares” reply changes when we’re told that we have to pay $30o and still have a two year commitment. In Apple’s case, their iPhone 4 might cost as much as $500 with more antennas. Aha, you’re getting it now.

Well, there’s one last issue at play. We touched on it with antennas. Extra antennas cost $$$ and we the buying public end up paying for the enhancements. But there’s another way that’s still a bit costly, but not so much. Like in football, if a team has just one receiver and he’s not a 7 foot tall phenomenon then what? You get a receiver that’s got talent and most important agility. A great receiver can escape a good defender and still make the catch. Great receivers, you know their names, also play quarterback from time to time. What about blocking. If one receiver can make a catch, what’s to stop his teammate from blocking the safety (defender) from getting in the way. Well in cell electronics it turns out that there are technologies such as filters that act to block out unwanted interference, but they’re costly and take up space. Better still are technologies that let the cellphone tune its antennas in much the same way that a great receiver knows to get around a defender. These tuning circuits, called tunable matching networks, make the antennas compensate when we hold the phone or when there’s something else interfering with a call. The tunable technology is still kind of new, but when it hits volume production, it’ll allow Apple and others to put their antennas wherever they want, even for looks.

Interference, like I described it here, is a far too simple of a description of the problem. There are other issues like inter-modulation and close proximity cross coupling and so on. The bottom line is that as cell phones become more and more like pieces of art, which we expect to work like our personal computers, we will see more problems with dropped calls OR we’ll have to get used to the idea of paying more money for technologies that work every time. I predict that Apple’s iPhone 4 will be the one of the last phones where this is a problem. Why? Well, most cell phone makers are smart, they understand the problem of interference and they don’t care if a phone isn’t pretty on the inside (if the outside looks nice) as long as it works. Even then, as we get access to 4G and LTE we’re going to see the problem more and more. Apple’s mistake is a free lesson for Motorola, HTC, Samsung, RIM, and LG. If they’re smart, they won’t do as Apple did. They’ll let the circuit designers do their job and if there’s no getting around the problem of interference then they’ll have to use the new technologies I mentioned in order to make their phones work and that means we pay more. I guarantee it.

Windows Mobile, the grand-dad of all smart phone Operating Systems is slated to get an update to version 7. Not to sound like I’m in the dark, but does anyone still use a Window’s powered smart phone? With Nokia dominating worldwide cell phone sales then there’s RIM, the iPhone, and various versions of Google phones out there who would want to use such outdated technology. Unless like their desktop version, Microsoft’s mobile OS will finally find it’s own? Perhaps.

There are easily five or more competing smart phone OS’s available today. Symbian, RIM, Apple, and now Google appear to be the top runners. Microsoft used to be and anyone who owned an MS Mobile powered phone will tell you all about bugs. So why persist if market preferences have moved on. The best guess is that MS has found a way to stabilize the OS and make phones powered by the device run faster than ever. One can hope.

The smart phone and the PC appear to be heading toward not so distant collision course. If MS, Apple, or Google realize this, they will be thinking not about separate OS’s, but a single unified platform. Google appears to have grasped this with the announcement of Google powered netbooks (more to follow soon). Microsoft and Apple would be smart to see this trend.

The new Windows Mobile OS may end up being their best ever, but this MS after all. They’re constantly upgrading and tweaking any of the OS’s. Own a PC with Vista? Then you know what I mean. Apple appears to have the only company releasing stable OS’s because they use intensive in-house testing and only occasionally release upgrades. The rest use massive consumer bases as their test beds (why no-one’s rebelled against this is a massive surprise on its own).

No matter how well Windows 7 Mobile performs, be assured that you’re phone will be downloading upgrades on a regular basis. It wouldn’t be a Microsoft experience otherwise. Bet on it.

Was it too much to wish for another Jesus gadget from the almighty Apple? Well perhaps it was. In the wake of the new iPad, things don’t seem all that better. Sure the sun is shining (somewhere), but the reaction out on the blogosphere isn’t quite as far reaching as the iPhone. But wait.

Looking back, the reaction to the iPhone seemed a bit mild as well, then came the next generations of the device and wow did things change. Perhaps that’s the plan from good old Apple, intro a mildly exciting device and then make it better through iterations. If it survives, the iPad will only get better and that’s worth hanging out to see more.

If you’re a fan of things techie such as your netbook or iPhone, you might have caught on to the buzz about Apple. Here’s a company that without saying a word can manage to get bloggers and tech lovers in a froth. Why not?

Apple sets the standard on style and out of the box thinking. Who would’ve imagined a platform that created the sale of additional applications to the tune of about one billion? It’s hard to imagine that Apple would’ve known they’d sell or give away so many applications for the iPhone.

Along comes the buzz.

First, I’m with all the other tech watchers out there and I believe Apple will announce something within a few days of this report. Everyone wants to hit it on the head and say, it’s a tablet computer! Thing is, tablet computers aren’t that big of a deal, but neither were mp3 players or cell phones – until Apple came along. So here they stand a chance to add some rather necessary juice to the whole tablet business. Why? It’s an under performing segment of notebook computing. According to Gartner, a tech industry analysis company, netbooks have outsold smart phones since the last quarter of 2008. The big deal here, is for Apple to find another avenue to continue to grow it’s applications business.

So what could do that? Another iPhone? The so called iSlate?

The bottom line here is that netbooks and their ilk make a decent profit in the hands of standard PC guys, but what say you put that in the hands of Apple and they convince their customers that instead of paying $200 for a smaller than average notebook PC (netbook), they instead pay $500 or so? Suddenly, a product that was probably profitable at the lower price becomes even more of a money maker.

Look at Apple product pricing, on the low end you have the iPod Touch at $200, then the iPhone at $300, and finally any of their PCs at $1400 or more. They need a middle ground. Think of a product at less than a thousand, but more than an iPhone and you arrive at that precious mid point that Apple’s ignored for ages.

Like in the past, Apple will create the buzz now and roll the product out two quarters later. Whatever they plan to announce, a touch like product would be cool. A product that uses the iPhone infrastructure would be smart. A device that rounds out their portfolio, but keeps their profitability high would more of the same genius they’re known for.

So how does this tie into Intel? Well, in December they announced a new family of Atom processors and one of which was a dual core device. According to Intel, the “D510 is for entry-level desktop PCs is a dual core Atom processor with 1meg L2 cache and a 15-watt total kit TDP including chipset. The new chips all run at 1.66GHz.” Such a low power high performing device could find no better home than in a new Apple smart book of some kind.

Whatever the news, it’s sure been fun to watch all the buzz about the new Apple device. Who knows what it’ll be, but the world will soon know. Then we’ll all sit waiting for the next buzz.