Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

Bad cell phone reception? The zBoost SOHO Cell Signal Booster might be able to help...emphasis on might. It really depends on where you're located, and whether there's enough signal to boost in the first place. Worth checking out if you're not having any luck getting your wireless carrier to tweak things in your area...

On a warm and muggy Austin morning, I arrived at a fairly nondescript building nestled inside an office park along a road that had recently suffered a bit of flood damage from tropical storm Hermine. The location that I was visiting was the headquarters of ETS-Lindgren, which in their own words is "... a specialty manufacturing and construction company which builds facilities and the component hardware and software required to make world class measurements under carefully controlled electrical... conditions". What does that mean? It means they do some pretty cool things that help make the gadgets we all love to use the best they can be. Read more...

"As my old 3G was still in use (it's now my wife's iPhone), I could conduct a test. Turning off Wi-Fi on both phones, I tracked their behavior. I confirmed that there were numerous occasions when the iPhone 3GS connected to EDGE while the iPhone 3G hooked up to a 3G network-even when the two devices were side-by-side. The reverse virtually never happened. Most of the time, the two iPhones connected to the same network, but a difference was definitely detectable."

The consensus is that the 3GS simply reports the network status more accurately. Not sure I buy that, but it is what it is, I guess.

I'm having a different issue. When the phone first wakes from sleep, my WiFi strength is one bar and that persists for quite a bit in areas where I know I have full signal because after a bit of run time, the signal strength moves to where it should be. I wonder if maybe these two issues are related and maybe the iPhone 3GS does simply report signal strength more accurately?

Anyone else who can do a direct comparison between the 3G and 3GS? Share your thoughts in the comments!