Jared Franklin

UPDATE: Apple has acknowledged the antenna problem. Steve Jobs told one iPhone 4 owner to hold it differently. He told another that "there is no reception issue. Stay tuned."

Original: Apple's iPhone 4 is off to a rough start (sales numbers, excepted).

The phone is barely in the hands of consumers, and there have been widespread gripes from early adopters. Some of these aren't one-off whines either--in one case, they involve a legitimate concern that seems to affect every unit.

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.

See Also: Is iPhone 4 Jinxed? Maybe! Here's The Evidence →