File this under “we told you so.”
Lab tests by Consumer Reports have confirmed what Wired and its readers have been telling you all along: The problem with the iPhone 4’s reception has nothing to do with how the signal-strength bars are represented, and everything to do with the phone’s faulty antenna design.
Consumer Reports took three separate iPhone 4s into the controlled environment of their radio frequency-insulated testing chamber. That room is insulated from all outside RF signals, so there’s nothing to interfer with the tests. Once inside the chamber, the testers set each iPhone to connect with a base station emulator — a piece of testing equipment that acts like one of AT&T’s cellphone towers. They then tested the iPhones’ ability to connect when held various ways.
“Our engineers found that when you place your finger on the gap between the two antennas on the lower left hand side of the iPhone 4, signal strength can drop by about 20 decibels — and that’s enough to drop a call,” CR reported in a video posted on its site (and embedded below).
In other words, it’s a design problem, not an issue with the way the iPhone 4 displays its signal strength bars, as Apple has tried to claim.
Significantly, CR’s tests showed that just a light finger touch was enough to trigger the problem — no sweaty-palmed “death grip” is required, as other testers have reported.
Further, CR’s tests place the blame squarely on Apple’s phone, not AT&T’s network. Because these tests were done in a controlled environment where no other devices were competing to connect with the base station, the reception problems can’t be attributed to network congestion or to a flaw in AT&T’s wireless network.
Because of those flaws, CR says it cannot recommend the iPhone 4 to consumers.
If you still want an iPhone 4, however, the magazine recommends placing a strip of duct tape over the corner of the phone — much like the electrical tape solution Wired reader Ryan Rhea recommended two weeks ago.
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