Cellphone radiation

The recent iPhone 4 antenna problems have made a lot of news. As an Android user, I have no experience or vested interest in the matter, but I did read one excellent article about cell phone antennas in general and what causes the problems in the case of the iPhone 4:

"Just about every cell phone in current production has the antenna located at the bottom.  This insures that the radiating portion of the antenna is furthest from the head.  Apple was not the first to locate the antenna on the bottom, and certainly won't be the last.  The problem is that humans have their hands below their ears, so the most natural position for the hand is covering the antenna.  This can't be a good design decision, can it?  How can we be stuck with this conundrum?  It's the FCC's fault."

The article got me curious about how much radiation does my Android emit. To determine, I had to dig out the "FCC ID" for my Android -- this requires taking out the back panel and the battery, the FCC ID is printed underneath: NM8PB99100.

I went to the FCC website, and typed the ID into the form. Incidentally, why on earth does the FCC website require the user to split the ID in this way? Wouldn't it be easier to just have one text input box and have the code do the splitting for you? Bizarre.

The resulting page is a jumble of information, poorly organized and hard to dig through. When I click on "Details", I'm greeted with the following lovely warning:

To get the actual radiation report, I need to figure out which of the following documents actually contains this information:

The attachments are all listed as PDF files, but when I click on them, they download as HTML, so I can't open any of them.

Are you kidding me? I'm not exactly inclined to trust the FCC much based on what I've seen so far.

After some digging, it looks like the numbers I'm after are in "EN-2009-90001_OET65_Test report(Page.1-100)", on pages 4/5:

These are pretty standard numbers as far as smartphones go -- I think the FCC requires no more than 1.5W/kg SAR, and the Android is under that. The iPhone is in the same range. Interestingly, the radiation is lower next to the head but higher when the phone is body-worn.

The PDF itself is actually pretty interesting to read, in particular the part about how they do the testing. As the original AntennaSys article above points out, the FCC requires testing with the phone next to the head but does not specify how the phone is held next to the head. All kinds of interesting.