Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yanellena 1010 days ago
The phone doesn't meet the regulations which means it can't be sold. Whether they're good regulations or not is another matter.
3 comments

I think parent is questioning the premise of said regulations.
I wonder why it took them 3 years to find out, I thought these radiation tests are pretty basic these days due to cancer scares some decade and half (?) ago. I think gsmarena publishes similar values in their summary pages, but maybe its just copy paste from release material.
I guess this is because the agency is underfunded. Their missions are not only to check the radiation on new phones but also to check all 2G/3G/4G/5G in France (about 200k) and investigated in case of radio-frequency problems.
> I wonder why it took them 3 years to find out

From the ANFR publication [1] «141 mobile phones, including Apple’s iPhone 12, have recently been tested to check compliance with limit SAR values».

I suspect they simply weren't tested before. sigh.

[1] https://www.anfr.fr/liste-actualites/actualite/temporary-wit...

Most EU regulations let manufacturers self certify they are observing them. This should come with heavy testing but sadly this is so irregular you can get away with a lot.

A few years ago a French tech journal caught several huge chinese PSU maker who claimed they had all certification but during actual testing they would catch fire or short under 50% of rated load.

This was explained on French news: those radiation levels can vary with a software update. It's likely they were compliant before and a software update changed that.

Which also means the fix can be a software update. That was (according to the news) the likely way this would be resolved.

Yea this should have been acted on faster. I wish we had more of this data easily available for everything. Ear buds are directly next to our heads.
It's perfectly fine to discuss if these are good regulations or not in this thread. Shame for down voting based on this.