iPhone 4 antenna histeria
I’ll start by saying that I got my iP4 on 6/23, a day early. I’ve been using it exclusively since, and have terrible reception at home (nothing new for me). Even with the latest 4.0.1 I drop lots of calls, and have periods during almost every call where the call fades in and out but does not drop. I’ll be blabbing away, and the person on the other end will begin asking “hello ? are you still there ? hello ?”, and then I mysteriously reappear on the call. I’ve had the exact same behavior without any case, with a bumper case, and with a belkin case, and a variety of grips, so I’m clearly in a less than ideal cell area, especially for this phone. While the fading behavior is new for me, the poor reception is not. Every phone I’ve owned over the past several years has had poor reception and call drop issues at my house, from RAZRs, to Palm treos, through all 4 iPhones. Every phone, including my iP4, has performed wonderfully everywhere else I spend any amount time, so for me, this is unfortunately status quo.
All told, it is still an amazing device. I’m using it for quite a lot these days from reading books via the Kindle app to communicating with foreign colleagues via Skype, and even with the less than stellar reception at home I would be hard pressed to replace it with anything else, nor do I want to.
What I really want to comment on though is the media response to the antenna issue. As Steve Jobs pointed out at the time of the press conference last week, the device had been out for 22 days at the time of the conference, by which point Consumer Reports and a host of other media outlets had whipped the antenna topic into quite the frenzy. 22 days is not a lot of time, and while Apple is notoriously quite about many of its issues, they deserved more time to diagnose the issue properly in my opinion. Particularly for something that involves thorough testing in special facilities and complex data analysis thereafter. I’d rather they do it right and find the true root cause, before issuing incorrect or insufficient information on the matter.
It certainly appeared as though CR and the others were interested in increasing their own readership more than anything else.