Today is a big day for Apple, as it is the launch day for their iPhone 4. We picked up on a couple of issues earlier – one concerning the line segregation and the other about possible yellowish discoloration appearing on that new Retina display of theirs. However, we have just learned of another problem, this time with its reception.
Devindra Hardawar from VentureBeat has been explaining how some people were losing reception when they held the antenna band on the fourth-generation iPhone in a certain way. You can see this happening in the video that we have posted for you below.
Gizmodo has also seen this problem, 16 readers said that they also had this same problem. Apple is aware of this screen issue and has already given customers new units, but they have yet to acknowledge this problem with poor reception.
However, as owners were still able to make and receive calls it could just be a software glitch. Do you have the same issue? Please share this information with our readers.
The biggest complaint to emerge is that the phone’s signal strength drops when a user grips the phone by the metal antenna band. Gizmodo has over a dozen videos of users showing off this problem.
We’ve run the same test on our phone. When we held the phone in front of us in our left hand with our fingers touching the metal band, the bars representing signal strength dropped from 5 to 1 in less than a minute.
The problem appears to involve finger-contact on certain parts of the metal band. When we switched the phone to our right hand (which put our fingers in different positions), the signal strength remained the same.
This is a strange error. Assuming the signal strength actually affects the quality of phone calls, Apple had better be able to fix this problem with a firmware update, or it will likely have millions of irate customers.
Other reported iPhone 4 problems are of the one-off type. They include screens shipping with discoloration, including yellowing in the bottom right corner and fragility. The iPhone has already been scratched by at least one user, and another user says s/he dropped an iPhone from a foot up and the glass back of the phone shattered.
Apple will likely sell 1+ million units today, so the scratched, broken, and yellow phones don’t seem much of a concern (although any other company would be catching hell for them). The reception problem, however, could be a big issue.
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