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.
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 ...
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.
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.
http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/TechRadar...
on both sides too!
