Ever wonder why the iPhone's speaker is on the bottom of the phone? |
Ever wonder why the iPhone's speaker is on the bottom of the phone? |
The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an
austere, abstract, platonic-looking form that
somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and
ergonomic. Unlike my phone. He picks it up and
points out four little nubbins on the back. "Your
phone's got feet on," he says, not unkindly. "Why
would anybody put feet on a phone?" Ive has the
answer, of course: "It raises the speaker on the
back off the table. But the right solution is to
put the speaker in the right place in the first
place. That's why our speaker isn't on the bottom,
so you can have it on the table, and you don't
need feet." Sure enough, no feet toe the iPhone's
smooth lines.
Also, putting my iPhone down without scratching the front or the back glass on a piece of sand or dirt is an art.
Yes, the iPhone 4(s) is pretty, but you sacrifice function for that beauty.
Does iOS watch your use patterns for the phone and mute alerts when it thinks you're asleep? It could be just me, but I know I'm not the only one with a Pavlovian response when I hear the mail dinger. And the phone is abnormally quiet until just around the time I normally get up, then I hear the morning mail ding in.
Am I nuts? Wife says I am.
I suspect it mutes alerts after a period of inactivity (but it could be something sneaky like a combination of the photosensor and accelerometer reporting dark and no movement).
Although I may have become so used to the sound that I can tune it out ...
If you had started on an android phone, you would probably have written a similar piece talking about how apple phones get muted when placed on a fluffy blanket (as the edge gets covered), and how the android hardware designers did it right.
You should focus on talking about design tradeoffs irrespective of your current behavior. Reading about how you can't train yourself to place your phone face down, and that this is somehow a samsung design flaw, isn't interesting :-/
We don’t know whether Apple considered that problem but it’s a problem nonetheless.
Various devices deal with this in various ways (by putting little ugly feet on the back as someone noticed, by slightly curving the surface on which the speaker is located, or as iPhone does it by placing it on a plane which in most scenarios sits perpendicular to the surface on which the device is resting).
Whether Apple's solution is the most elegant is also arguable but everyone is entitled to an opinion. One thing is for sure, this wasn't some obscure problem that no engineer has ever thought of until Apple decided to save us.
Instead, he shared a problem that he had with his Android – not that it wasn't like the iPhone, but that it didn't wake him up properly.
The rest of his piece put across a hypothesis that builds upon the problem.
Worse than putting the speakers on the back, the LG team actually stuck the speakers on the INSIDE of the phone. Yeah, it's fine and loud when you open it up, but you can barely hear the phone ring when it's closed and in a pocket. Things like this really bother me. Thanks for pointing this out.
i just put my nexus s on my desk and the speaker worked just fine. the whole reason why there's a little bump over the center of the speaker is to raise it off of a flat surface and let the audio get out.
putting the iphone in a dock probably muffles the audio coming from its bottom speaker (though maybe apple's dock accounts for this, maybe 3rd party ones don't).
there's probably not a perfect way to solve this for every user. if you know the speaker is on the back, don't rest it on a blanket. if it's on the bottom, don't use it in a dock.
http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/TechRadar...
on both sides too!
A 2nd grader's understanding of physics informs us that yes, indeed, there will be some situation in which the iPhone's speaker is obstructed and another speaker isn't (why, you could stand the phone up!). But what obstruction is going to be more common?
If frequency of obstruction isn't the only issue, what's the compensating virtue of having the speaker on the back of the phone? How valuable is that compensation?
I did a quick search to see if any of those issues have been talked about wrt iphones, and the top hit was http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=761725 ("when i listen at max volume [my iphone] is really bad. my nokia N82 compared is like a audiophile system") -- which I imagine is caused by the N82 having a larger speaker positioned on the back.
Probably not since the rear speaker on the Android phone would be completely muted by the same fluffy blanket.
> Reading about how you can't train yourself to place your phone face down, and that this is somehow a samsung design flaw, isn't interesting :-/
If the user has to work around a problem with the design, that's a flaw.
Puts the iphone 4 over 3g as ~3x quieter than a nexus s over 3g. (2g is closer, but no one I know uses their iphone 4 over 2g).
From the review: "For a long while, people have complained that the iPhone [3g & 3gs]'s speakerphone volume was too quiet... I'd say the iPhone 4's speakerphone is still loud enough, though calls over 3G are still a bit too quiet. Until Apple increases the gain on 3G calls, iPhone 4 customers who are hard of hearing should invest in a bluetooth headset."
Screen damage rates for iPhone 4 are far higher than Nexus S. I take it from your message that you believe this is due to a design flaw. Interesting... I suppose I agree.
> requires the user to adapt to something that could have been done correctly in the first place ... that's a flaw.
No, it couldn't have been done correctly in the first place. The iphone 4 sacrifices 66% of its speaker volume relative to the nexus s to get side placement. That's also a flaw. Design is about tradeoffs.
As for the speaker, if I have to set my phone face down to hear the alarm, that's a design flaw. If the Nexus designers believe that a louder speaker is more important, that's valid, but it's not valid if the extra volume is muffled when placed on a surface in the natural fashion.
Why the change from your earlier position of screen breakage indicating a design flaw?
> If the Nexus designers believe that a louder speaker is more important, that's valid, but it's not valid if the extra volume is muffled when placed on a surface in the natural fashion
Would you care to explain why you believe this and not the opposite? If you were hard of hearing do you think you would have written something like "If the iPhone designers believe that a side speaker is more important, that's valid, but it's not valid if the side speaker is too quiet for many users to hear"
