Apple, and Steve Jobs specifically tended to view the seemingly small problems with the iPhone 4 antenna and reception as a quick and fixable tech issue. But now there is a growing backlash that Apple cannot ignore. Consumer Reports, a non-profit magazine, published a review on Monday that indicated it had tested three iPhone 4s and found that touching the lower left corner can degrade the signal significantly, even causing dropped calls.
How is this playing out in Wall Street? Apparently many Wall Street analysts do not think the antenna issue would seriously hurt sales of the iPhone 4. Some claiming that concerns around product issues tend to be overblown. That is what Ben Reitzes, a Barclays analyst, wrote to clients on Tuesday.
For their part, Apple had earlier made things worse by denying there was any reception problem at all. Now they have gone and deleted references in several online discussions to the consumer reports online posting, leading VentureBeat and investment blogs to jump on what they described as censorship in the Apple-hosted forums.
Was the original testing from Consumer Reports accurate and valid? Here is what endgadget had to say “we actually asked our good friend Erica Sadun from TUAW to write us a bespoke signal strength appfor iOS 4. Obviously we couldn’t submit it to the App Store, but we’ve been running it on all of our phones here at Engadget and we can independently confirm Consumer Reports‘ finding that there’s a serious signal attenuation issue with the iPhone 4′s antenna — every phone we’ve tested displays dropped signal when held with the bottom left corner covered. ”
It is hard to believe that Apple did not see this problem coming when the product was in the testing phase. They either did not see it at all, which is hard to believe, or they thought that the problem was not a significant issue, and could be fixed with a software patch, if it was a software problem at all. However, if it is a hardware problem, then a recall will be the most likely event to take place.
Here is a video discussion that shows the iPhone4 in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmlUktgt5iU
Source: Endgadget
