I have even noticed a backtracking in the media. PC World headlines are now “PR Experts say Apple antennagate will not affect Apple’s image” and “Apple’s gambit my have paid off”.

Are these the same “PR Experts” who only last week said a recall to the tune of 1.5 billion was ineveitable? What happened? And where is the media frenzy now? After all, if the problem was as bad as it was made out to be, then technically people should still be baying for blood no?

Then connecting antenna to ground or another antenna, this was teached on basic school also:
find old radio and grip your hand to it’s antenna: you CAN hear the effect, how the white noise starts to come thru.
This is what is happening on iPhone4 .. you actually touch antenna and if you do it *that way* you will touch wifi antenna on same time –> white noise will overcome actual signal.

Old Nokia phones had antennas, where you could touch it, but that was 20 years ago.
Steve didn’t wish to pay lisences for such end consumer friendly antenna patents, which are widely in use nowadays, so he invented his own … iMazing Antenna, which everyone else dropped few decades ago and here we have result.

I have had various phones (nokia, samsung, motorla, palm etc) in past 20 years and I am happy for my current N900, which you can hold as ever you like and make a call.

Given that effect on users is a apparently “step function” i.e. you don’t notice it until the signal degrades to a certain point and them it hits hard, I would expect iPhone users in Finland to be largely unaffected.

I found the “X marks the spot” bit in Job’s press conference very peculiar. It’s as though Jobs is saying “We made an explicit trade off in our antenna design. In order to achieve all the other great things in the iPhone 4, we opted for a ‘Single Point of Degradation’. And we put a visible line there so users know exactly where not to touch it.”

Huh?

Inacurate :
What does testing the device have to do with anything? Why do I need to waste time confirming a repeatable bug? The whole “You haven’t even used it line” is a very sorry defense in this case. I do not need to test the device to know the problem exists. It is a fact that if you hold the iPhone 4 in a certain manner, you impede one of it’s most basic functions. Whether or not you can live with it or if it even affects you, is not at issue.
Anyway, as fun as this is you don’t seem able to understand what I am saying and continue to bring up points that are irrelevant to the matter at hand. So, good luck in life…

Only by using the product it is possible to evaluate what is the real scope of the said problem and does it really matter. I apologize for being “defensive”, but for some reason I weigh a real world test more than the word of a random guy on the internet, who is a self proclaimed Apple hater, and has seen a few videos on the Youtube. Newsflash: Youtube is not the whole truth and it does not give you much context. I do not assume E71 is horrible just because I have seen it drop bars on Youtube, you perhaps would.

I did my best to “hold the iPhone 4″ in a certain manner and it dropped a bar or two. As did 3G, as did E71. In none of the above cases I think it is a real problem. For someone else it may be, depending on loads of factors. That person should think of a solution, the percentage of those seem not to be rather small. For me, only the actual problems count, not the imaginary or theoretical ones. I kinda do understand your need to exaggerate though.

BTW, I really like your stylish way of discourse with oneliners like “God”, fanboysim and “good luck with life”. Brings back memories.

Nothing is perfect, but they didn’t even try to make it perfect. They made a conscious decision to design an INTEGRAL component of a wireless device so it enabled the final result (how the iPhone 4 looks) to be better looking, more aesthetic on the eyes.

Steve Jobs himself admitted this on Friday on the conference.

What does testing the device have to do with anything? Why do I need to waste time confirming a repeatable bug? The whole “You haven’t even used it line” is a very sorry defense in this case. I do not need to test the device to know the problem exists. It is a fact that if you hold the iPhone 4 in a certain manner, you impede one of it’s most basic functions. Whether or not you can live with it or if it even affects you, is not at issue.

Anyway, as fun as this is you don’t seem able to understand what I am saying and continue to bring up points that are irrelevant to the matter at hand. So, good luck in life…

You seem to come from a standpoint that anything but a perfect is totally unacceptable, especially if that happens to be in an Apple device. I am not that fanatical. I would like to remind that one of us has tested the device and it apparently is not you.

In your beloved car analogy the car company has promised something very easily mesurable, speed, in this case no such claim is made. Apple does not promise dB will not get lower no matter how you hold the phone.

I am sorry but I did not follow your logic about the algorithm for showing the bars and who is to blame. The fix was a cosmetical one not a baseband one. And frankly why should *I* be thinking about it, I am not an AT&T customer.

During the past two years I have been quite happy with Sonera network in Finland with my 3G and 3GS. During that time I have tested a bunch of S40 and Symbian devices and of course the N900, each for a week or two, I have not noticed a big difference in connectivity here.