My iPhone Wish: Signal Strength Tracker

CPU UsageI 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.


8 Responses to “My iPhone Wish: Signal Strength Tracker”

  1. Justin Says:

    Shameless indeed. I came here wondering if you posted something on the iPhone.

  2. barry.b Says:

    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?

  3. Hanford Says:

    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.

  4. RohoMech Says:

    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.

  5. Hanford Says:

    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.

  6. Harry Says:

    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…

  7. Makinalari Says:

    i think, N95 is better than iPhone.

  8. Billigflug Says:

    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!

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