Beyond the Bumper: Apple introduces iDish for iPhone

Cupertino, CA — Apple today expanded its line of iPhone 4 performance enhancement products with iDish, the world’s smallest satellite dish. Designed to integrate beautifully with iPhone 4, it’s perfect for those who wish to improve reception without covering the device’s sleek design.

Like Apple’s popular iHand, iDish solves iPhone reception woes, but does so by taking a very different path — straight to the heavens. Miniaturizing the technology enjoyed by millions of satellite TV users, iDish receives five bars of signal from the source 22,000 miles up.

iDish is engineered to get you up and running quickly. Just plug it into iPhone’s earphone jack, align with magnetic north, calculate azimuth and elevation angles for your geographic location, enter data into the special iDish app, aim iDish toward an unobstructed view of the southern sky, and make your call. (Apple recommends avoiding body rotation greater than 5% when connected.)

To make things even easier, the Apple Store will offer a special seven-week One-to-One iDish course, led by telecommunications engineers and astrophysicists.

Initial reactions to iDish are generally positive, but the wolves are already out. Some criticize Apple’s choice to mount iDish in the earphone jack, making it impossible to use earphones. But the inconvenience is only temporary.

“Earphone users are actually a small percentage of our iPhone customers,” says Apple spokesperson Marie McDonald, “but we want to make everyone happy. So the iPhone Earphone Jack Splitter Adapter will ship by the end of August.”

Apple later clarified that only the black model of the Splitter will ship this month. The white model will ship “sometime in the future.”