Consumer Report: The iPhone 4's no good. Apple: Buy the phon! Buy the phon!
Weeks ago, the Consumer Reports announced that they strongly recommend the Apple iPhone 4, saying that it’s the best smartphone out there. Funny that they would say such thing when, they’re a serious non-profit organization who does unbiased testing on products before releasing their definitive opinions, would release such statement even before testing it. Must have be the job of some fan boys in the group.
Either way, Consumer Reports has finally inspected the handset and they have further confirmed the problem. Their engineers have apparently just completed testing of the phone and have discovered it has the reception issues everyone else in the whole wide world has known about for weeks.
“When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side-an easy thing, especially for lefties-the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.”
“We reached this conclusion after testing all three of our iPhone 4s (purchased at three separate retailers in the New York area) in the controlled environment of CU’s radio frequency (RF) isolation chamber. In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers. We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.”
Of kush, when you let such a big organization ‘not recommending’ your product to the rest of the world, surely you have to do something about it. However, Apple did not go and alter the antenna design, did not recall all the phones for a hardware fix, and did not solve the issue by giving out free bumpers. Nope, they go and cover up the news by deleting threads about the Consumer Reports article from its support forums.
But then, deleting threads in their support forum is not a bolt from the blue. Apple has been ‘regulating’ their forums on discussion of hardware flaws that it deems will impact negative glimpse on its products’ image. Well, until the issue’s solved, we shall hold it differently until end of days.
