Funniest announcement EVER about Apple products:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8761240.stm
Steve's "Golden" and very helpful advise is:
"Just avoid holding it in that way."
Let's back up a bit here ... hold it that way?
Sink a few hundred in to a new toy, to find out you can't hold it in a regular and accepted way. A phone that can only be handled in a certain way? Have we gone foward or backwards here?
The official advice from Apple is to:
"avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band".
Another insightful response from Apple:
"Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas."
Gripping stuff, my iPhone 3G isn't as fickle about being touched, so this is due to the new antenna being on the outside, oh yeah and being on the bottom left!
I was going to buy one of these puppies. If the queues were not so long yesterday I'd probably have one here right now. Kind of relieved that I didn't. Apple seem to have teething trouble every time they release something new. All companies do I guess.
I'll most likely wait for Apple to revise the hardware and engineer out this flawed antenna as I'm always going to hold it "that way" since I'm left handed. Guess Steve wants us lefties to disappear or not buy his phones! Maybe he should get some lefties to join his test group so this kind of sillyness doesn't happen again ... I bet someone in the Apple engineering department has known about this since day 1 :-) Impossible to imagine that they don't.
Good luck Apple :-)
Links:
http://gizmodo.com/5571171/iphone-4-loses-reception-when-you-hold-it-by-the-antenna-band <--- this ones worth following as it is getting updated a fair bit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYmVpoccPnc&feature=player_embedded#!
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/jobs-on-iphone-4-antenna-avoid-holding-it-in-this-way.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
Read the complete post at http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/r0b/archive/2010/06/25/iphone-4-get-a-grip.aspx