Hasta La Gadget!

The Verizon iPhone 4's network settings menu. Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Consumer Reports claims the Verizon iPhone 4 exhibits signal loss when held in a specific way, similar to the problems seen in the AT&T iPhone 4 last year.

Never mind that Consumer Reports was initially hasty to downplay concerns about AT&T iPhone 4 antenna issues last year without doing testing of its own, only to completely flip-flop after running some lab tests and concluding that the antenna design was seriously flawed.

Now Consumer Reports says it has put the Verizon iPhone through the same lab tests inside a radio-frequency isolation chamber and found that the Verizon iPhone 4, too, may lose its connection when held “in a specific but quite natural way,” in areas with weak signal conditions.

“For that reason, we are not including the Verizon iPhone 4 in our list of recommended smartphones, despite its high ranking in our Ratings,” Consumer Reports said in its report.

In an episode famously named “Antennagate,” many early iPhone 4 customers in 2010 reported that covering the lower-left antenna band of the handset caused significant signal loss, or at worst, dropped calls. Bad press about the AT&T iPhone 4’s antenna design escalated to the point that Apple had to hold a press conference to address the issue.

CEO Steve Jobs explained to journalists that every smartphone has “weak spots” that may cause signal attenuation when held in a certain way. Apple found that keeping a protective case around the iPhone 4 decreased the likelihood of signal loss, so the company started a temporary free-case program for customers experiencing the issue.

However, in Consumer Reports lab tests, the iPhones were the only smartphones that exhibited signal loss when touched with a finger in a specific place (the lower left corner, where two different external metal antennas are separated by a thin black band).

Despite the wave of negative commentary on the antenna, the iPhone 4 was Apple’s best-selling handset ever, with 14.1 million iPhones sold in the fourth quarter of 2010.

In other words, even though wishy-washy Consumer Reports doesn’t recommend the Verizon iPhone, people are probably still going to buy it anyway.

In my review of the Verizon iPhone, I found that its call quality and reliability were superior to that of the AT&T iPhone’s. However, data transfers were significantly slower than AT&T’s, making the AT&T iPhone better for media consumption (watching Netflix, downloading apps, etc.) while the Verizon iPhone is superior for phone calls.

The Xoom’s big attraction may be the ethereal Honeycomb that oozes within it, but it’s still a gadget made of metal, silicon and plastic, so we’re as keen as anyone to see what its insides look like. iFixit has dutifully performed the task of tearing one down to its constituent components and found an Atmel touchscreen controller capable of picking up 15 inputs at a time, a Qualcomm MDM6600 chip capable of 14.4Mbps HSPA+ speeds, some Toshiba NAND flash memory, and of course, NVIDIA’s beloved Tegra 2 dual-core SOC. The conclusion reached was that the Xoom is relatively easy to repair, though you should be aware there are no less than 57 screws holding the thing together, so free up a nice long afternoon if you intend to disassemble one yourself.

Aside from Moto’s flagship tablet, iFixit has also gotten to grips with Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, the one that can do Thunderbolt-fast transfers with as yet nonexistent peripherals, though discoveries there were predictably few and far between. The wireless card now has four antennas instead of three and there are some changes made to the cooling systems, but the real reason you’ll want to see this is the quad-core Sandy Bridge CPU lurking within — it’s as big and imposing as the performance it promises to deliver.

Motorola Xoom and Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Pro get torn down originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 12:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Inside the new 15 inch MacBook Pro, complete with Thunderbolt controller

The little pinky nail sized chip you see up there, inside the green square, is almost certainly the controller chip for the new MacBook Pro’s Thunderbolt port. The chip, and its tasty thermal paste topping, were found inside the new MacBooks by the teardown experts at iFixit.

The Thunderbolt (nee Light Peak) controller IC is what enables it to work its multi-protocol, daisy-chaining magic. Without that chip to process the serial data gushing through the copper, Thunderbolt would be little more than a dumb wire.

Other than Thunderbolt and upgrades to the CPU and graphics hardware, the new MacBooks are almost unchanged from the previous incarnation. The battery is the same 77.5 watt-hour model as before, and the case is virtually identical. Changes have been made to the wireless card now has four antennas instead of three, and the RAM is now the same as that used in last year’s 21.5 and 27 inch iMacs. There is also lots of thermal paste smeared around in there, which suggests that things are running hotter than before.

As ever, head to iFixit to see the guts if the new MBP in explicit, closeup detail, and marvel at just how few parts go into this thing.

MacBook Pro 15″ Unibody Early 2011 Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav!]

See Also:

• How Thunderbolt Could Hook Up Notebooks With Powerful Peripherals …
• Rumor: New MacBooks Come With Light Peak, Renamed 'Thunderbolt …
• New MacBooks Get Faster Chips, Thunderbolt Port

The Apple rumors game can be a volatile thing. Just as we’d heard about last minute alterations to the Apple TV before it hit the market, we’ve gotten word from sources that the iPad 2 slated to be announced next Wednesday will be sans a few of the features we’d previously reported. Notably, that SD card slot and higher resolution display won’t make it into the new model (the latter we’d been hearing rumblings about for a little while). What’s the cause of the switch? Well our sources weren’t crystal clear on the exact reasons, but the gist of what was explained to us centered around vague “engineering issues” which may have forced some changes at the eleventh hour. It’s worth noting once again that these sources have been dead right on specific Apple plans and specifications for unannounced products in the past, and we have no reason to believe these changes are due to anything more than legitimate engineering decisions made close to launch.

So what will we see on March 2nd? We’re hearing it’s most likely a thinner, spec-bumped variation of the original iPad with a screen size and resolution identical to the current model. More RAM (512MB) and a more powerful CPU (the A5) are expected as well. It’s also a pretty safe bet the tablet will be sporting at least one camera up front — though if some of those case mockups we’ve seen tell us anything, expect a shooter around back too. It’s also almost guaranteed that we’ll see the next version of iOS (number 5 in all likelihood, along with its SDK for devs), and an expansion of Apple’s cloud services (that part is a little… foggy right now). Of course, that will perfectly set up Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 5 in June, which is when iPad owners can likely expect to be using the new software. Regardless, we’ll have the goods come next week, so stay tuned!

Sources: iPad 2 lands in thinner body with spec bump and cameras, SD slot and higher resolution display are out originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple removes MobileMe from online store, discontinues retail boxes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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