I have received my brand-spanking-new iPhone 4 via FedEx (after they delayed the delivery by 3 days, and then sent it from Mississauga to Vancouver, and then back to the GTA to delay it one extra day). I also preemptively made a case for it out of a Moleskine notebook. Pretty impressive that the damned things fit together so snugly, considering I never had the iPhone with me while cutting, and based pretty much everything off of estimates and measurements from Wikipedia. I made another time-lapse video of the cutting process, and normal recordings for the unboxing and fitting of Ulrich (my phone) in his handmade crib.
Notes: The original audio track was supposed to be Kaela Kimura’s “Level 42″ but because the folks at Columbia Music are dicks sticklers about people promoting their artists on their behalf for free illegal use of their “property” they wouldn’t let me use it on YouTube and the audio got nuked. I then used an audio-swap feature of YouTube’s to substitute a pre-licensed song (the “I’m Feeling Lucky” automatic song finder gave me Finger Eleven’s “Paralyzer” after two tries).
I hope you enjoy the video, without the original, nicely cut and faded audio. Thanks be to Karen for helping me with the cutting of the pages, and Amy for her genius idea on how to bind and seal the pages together. Oh, and thanks be to Columbia Music, just for being the kind of company they are. Please, continue to set this kind of precedent for all those in the music industry and do for your artists what only you can do, and I’m almost sure you will have a flourishing business model on your hands. That, or crash and burn like the bags of fecal matter in airplanes low on fuel that you so desperately wish to resemble.
Hate for petty and childish business models aside, I’m loving the phone and loved making the case. I have indeed been able to replicate the attenuation problem (to crush the dreams of all those who were hoping some magical fix had been implemented in the second batch of iPhones), but it seems that it is only an issue in inherently weak-signaled places, and I do think the reception overall is actually better on the iPhone 4. For example, I get 3 bars that will drop to none or 1 when applying the death-grip to Ulrich from within my condo. As a reference, I normally get zero/no reception at all with my previous handset in the same spot. This proves that attenuation is still a problem. However, the fact that the phone even gets any reception in that spot at all indicates that the antennae actually performs better if not being cheated.