While tech sites and Apple aficionados are debating the iPhone 4, Consumer Reports magazine has made up its mind. In a posting on its Electronics Blog on Monday, the product-review organization said it cannot recommend the popular device because it has a reception problem.
“It’s official,” the posting by the organization’s Mike Gitas said. “Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception.”
The Good News
Gitas added that, when a finger or hand touches a spot on the lower left side of the device, “the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal.” Because of this, he wrote, Consumer Reports “can’t recommend the iPhone 4.”
The good news: The fix is simple, though inelegant. A piece of duct tape or “other thick, nonconductive material” over the antenna gap fixes the problem. At least one class-action suit against Apple over the signal issue has sought free iPhone cases from the Cupertino, Calif.-based company to fix the problem.
Gitas noted that the engineers’ conclusion was reached after testing three different iPhone 4s, which were purchased at three separate retailers in the New York area. The tests were conducted in the organization’s radio-frequency isolation chamber. A base-station emulator was used to simulate carrier cell towers.
Also tested this way were several other phones carried by AT&T, including the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre. The other phones didn’t have the same signal-loss problems. This indicated, CR said, that AT&T’s network might not “be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4’s much-reported signal woes.”
Avoid Gripping
The organization said its findings “call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4’s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software…