iPhone 4 Proximity Sensor Problem

By
On July 6, 2010

The proximity sensor tells the iPhone 4 how close your holding the phone to your face and controls whether or not the phone turns the screen off.  This helps to prevent you from pressing some buttons or hanging up on your call with your cheek.

If seems that some users are inadvertently hanging up on calls because the sensor isn’t shutting the screen down during a phone call.  So the question is, does the iPhone 4’s sensor have a hardware problem?  Is the software too sensitive?  Mis-calibrated?

Apple’s support forums are beginning to see a lot of questions about this issue and considering the fact that this has never been an issue for the other earlier iPhone models, I am wondering if it has something to do with hardware.  Our guess is that if it were a software issue, then this would also be happening on other iOS4 upgrades to 3GS phones and 3G phones, but we haven’t heard of any such complaints.

I wonder if Apple knows about this issue and is waiting on rolling out the major OS update to "fix" everything being reported along with the signal bars displayed "bug"?

Don’t get us wrong, we love our iPhones, and its truly an awesome device, but this version seems to have more then its fair share of Version 1 troubles.  Hopefully, Apple can get it together fairly quickly and repair these issues, so it doesn’t affect the growth of the iPhone.