Apple’s iPhone 4 Enjoys Great Reception, Suffers Bad Reception

When pre-orders for Apple’s iPhone 4 went live last week, it became clear very quickly that the company had another rip-roaring success on its hands. According to my Facebook account, some of my friends suffered F5 fever (page refreshing) late into the night, trying and retrying to get their order processed. Even Apple itself seemed to be taken by surprise, quickly producing a press release that stated just that.

This week, the iPhone’s began shipping, and customers all over are now receiving them. Some lucky few even received their units a day early, which isn’t at all typical of Apple’s tight scheduling and handling of things. There are few real complaints around the Web from users, so the reception overall seems rather good. Well, I guess it depends more on what reception you’re talking about.

As it appears, the iPhone 4 has a fault, a fault of which Apple denies being a fault at all. Many users reported issues with reception, with voice chat breaking up while talking normally on the phone. Believe it or not, if you find yourself dealing with the same issue, you’re probably just holding it in a less-than-perfect manner. No, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

In an issue I didn’t even know existed  (granted, I haven’t owned a hundred models like some people), if you hold the phone in what I believe to be the most typical manner, with the palm of your hand resting underneath the phone, your connection to the outer world will be severely limited. DailyTech decided to do its own tests with the latest phone and verified the issue to be true.

When the phone is gripped on the left and right side, the connection is full, but when held with the palm or fingers wrapped around the bottom left-hand corner, four bars quickly turn into one. Whatever happened to having the antennaes at the top of the phone? The solution? According to Apple’s ever-vocal CEO, Steve Jobs, you should “Just avoid holding it that way.“

Well, that fixes that problem. Next!

So Apple made a phone with an external antenna that has problems with reception when it comes in contact with the human body, then blames the consumer for holding the iPhone 4 in a perfectly reasonable fashion. This seems to be a very puzzling and troubling statement from the boys from Cupertino which sounds more like a hardware design problem than a “you’re holding it wrong” problem.