The news at a glance

last updated 8 January 2015

The iPhone 4: Apple offers a fix

A “snippy” Steve Jobs tackled the furor over the iPhone 4’s reception last week, offering owners of the smart phone a free case that should prevent dropped calls, said David Goldman in CNNmoney.com. The Apple CEO said the offer of a case runs until the end of September, “at which point, Jobs suggested, another fix may become available.” The reception problem can occur when an iPhone user’s hand covers the gap between the phone’s antennas, located on the device’s lower left-hand corner. Jobs pointed out that other smart phones can suffer a similar signal loss, and that only about one-half of 1 percent of iPhone 4 owners had called Apple to complain.

Jobs was right to call the fuss “overblown,” said Lance Ulanoff in PCmag.com. “If all you want to do is make phone calls, then, yes, the iPhone 4 could frustrate you.” But people buy the iPhone in part for all the other things it can do—like e-mailing, social networking, gaming, and viewing videos. The phone definitely has a glitch, and Apple is working on it. But the iPhone is still, “easily, the best touch-screen smart phone I’ve ever seen.”

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While much of the tech world’s attention was focused on Apple’s iPhone woes, Google last week quietly killed off its own smart phone, said Eric Zeman in Informationweek.com. The Nexus One, once touted as a possible “iPhone killer,” was sold online by Google directly to customers, starting in January. But it was “a failure from the start.” Wireless providers refused to support it, and customers favored phones they could “test-drive” before buying. “Phones are extremely personal devices,” and people just don’t want to buy them “sight unseen.”

A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel has recommended that GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug Avandia be sold under “severely restricted” conditions or taken off the market, said Gardiner Harris in The New York Times. The board expressed “great skepticism about the company’s trustworthiness,” citing company documents that showed that in the 1990s, GlaxoSmithKline withheld “crucial information” about Avandia’s heart-attack risk. The panel urged the FDA to allow the sale of Avandia only to patients who apply for special permission to use the drug.

In a sign that “a rebound in the global airline market is underway,” Boeing this week announced that Emirates Airlines had contracted to buy 30 of the Boeing 777 passenger jets, said Julie Johnson in ChicagoTribune.com. The $9.1 billion order comes “after two lean years for aircraft manufacturers.” Fast-growing Emirates, based in Dubai, owns more of the twin-aisle 777s than any other airline, with 86. Boeing also announced the sale of 40 737-800s to GE Capital, which leases the planes to many of the world’s airlines.

JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s second-largest bank, last week announced quarterly earnings that exceeded analysts’ expectations, said Eric Dash in The New York Times. The bank’s net income rose to $4.8 billion from $2.7 billion in the year-earlier quarter, but analysts were troubled that much of the rise was powered by a $1.5 billion reduction in the bank’s provision for bad loans. Like other big banks, JPMorgan still faces potentially large losses on mortgages and consumer loans, which could quickly wipe out those additional earnings.