Ping!
One person with direct knowledge of the phone’s design said Thursday that the iPhone 4 exposed a longstanding weakness in the basic communications software inside Apple’s phones and that the reception problems were not caused by an isolated hardware flaw.
Instead, the problems emerged in the complex interaction between specialized communications software and the antenna, said the person, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
The proof will be in the pudding. Whatever Apple announces today as their "fix" had better be conclusive and work reliably on every unit (except of course any with -other- unrelated individual problems).
If it's anything less than perfect, it'll appear as yet-another-whitewash, which would be incredibly unhappy for all.
I'm not an RF expert, I only dabble. I'll agree that the possibility exists for a software-only fix,... *IF* the problem is a software-only problem.
Long experience tells me that software cannot correct a hardware problem: it can accommodate the problem, it can mask the problem, and in some cases it can ameliorate the problem. But it cannot correct it in a true engineering sense.
I'll cross my fingers for Apple and wish them good luck, if this is the tack they take. But frankly I'm skeptical. I'm sorta hoping they own up to a hardware problem and correct it in a new release; people will believe that. And today, what people believe is Apple's biggest problem.