My iPhone Wish: Signal Strength Tracker
I would like a signal strength grapher, that plots out your signal strength on a little chart over time, much like Windows CPU usage meter.
The idea is that if I’m waiting for a call and I’m out somewhere. I can turn on the meter, drop it in my pocket for a minute, then pull it out and see if the phone was getting proper reception while it was in my pocket. Likewise, women could use this to determine signal strength in their purse, etc.
There’s a few different ways this feature could be implemented other than this, but this seems the most straightforward. Another way could be to have a special ring that lets you know you’ve lost signal; but that seems like it could get annoying.


I'm Hanford Lemoore. My parking skills are unparalleled.






July 1st, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Shameless indeed. I came here wondering if you posted something on the iPhone.
July 1st, 2007 at 6:58 pm
well, if you think the iPhone needs it you could probably build one with Flash/FlashLite calling down into the phone’s API.
What’s that you say? no Flash for the iPhone? Well, who would have thought someone from Adobe would forget about POSSIBLY THE HOTTEST DEVICE TO BE RELEASED ALL YEAR
Perhaps Bruce Chizen’s been too busy lining up his stock options to bother calling Steve Jobs to see what could be done?
July 1st, 2007 at 7:05 pm
I don’t think it was Adobe’s decision; I think it was Apple’s. Why? My first guess was that they feel Quicktime is superior to Flash. Seems odd though.
Secondly, and I this is my current thinking: At this point Apple and/or AT&T doesn’t want anything that streams over Edge. I say this because there’s reports that even Quicktime (outside of apple.com’s quicktimes) won’t play in iPhone’s browser (as seen here: http://terrywhite.com/techblog/?p=196 , which by the way is the best review of the iPhone I’ve seen to day as far as completeness goes). Wav files don’t play either.
Or, the iPhone is actually underpowered, and running Flash movies (slowly) shows that off.
I dunno. Just guesses.
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:22 am
I wonder if the anti-stream decision was motivated by Edge’s overall slowness. It seems a low of reviewers like / love the phone, but not so much the network it uses.
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:18 am
Either overall slowness or the fact that all the plans are unlimited usage. Without streaming or binary file downloads (other than images) there’s going to be a lot less usage on the network.
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:01 am
There’s this trick you can do with the iPhone—you:
1. take it out of your pocket
2. look at the signal level
3. if it’s poor, move somewhere with a good signal
4. stay there until you’ve received your vital call.
Apparently this also works with the N95.
hehehe… just teasing…
October 9th, 2007 at 10:13 am
i think, N95 is better than iPhone.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:01 am
N95 is a really good mobile, but it´s battery is too low, it makes only one day and then you have to recharge it, that´s really nasty. The iPhone 3G is great, especially for developers!