That's funny.
My wife works at a University where just about every student assistant has an iPhone. And they have ALL bitched about this little gap on the edge of the phone that if you happen to put your fingers across the call gets dropped.
I don't have an iPhone so I'm not sure what they are talking about, but talk about it they do. Wonder how Consumer Reports got them all to lie like that?
There are much better places to get consumer electronics info such as CNET.
Well, because of their ratings of SUVs I have been stuck with a dog SUV and instead of driving it into the ground, my usual model, I am selling it fast.
Read the article... and the reports of people who WORK with cell phone radios and antennas who could not duplicate the so called problem. I have an iPhone4 and could not duplicate the problem using PROPER test equipment in proper testing labs, unlike the junk that CU used. They found that the iPhone4 starts out with a better ability to receive signals and finishes with a better ability to receive signals than other phones even after attenuation... The drop is a percentage of the starting signal... and that was something the clueless testers at Consumers Reports had no awareness of.
I have over 25 friends with an iPhone4... and none of us could duplicate the problem, and we tried, hard, and only one had a problem with dropped calls greater than she had with her iPhone 3Gs... and she lives in the boonies where the AT&T signal is pretty spotty. All of us have BETTER reception with our iPhone4s than we had with our previous phones. The facts are different than what was being reported... which was a load of FUD being orchestrated by Google to promote sales of the Android phones.
It is very strange that the REST OF THE WORLD MARKETS could not duplicate the antennagate issues when the unchanged iPhone4 was released there. Once those facts came out, the FUD essentially stopped! In fact, the antennagate issue dropped out of site and Apple discontinued its free bumper program the started to counter the bad publicity that was being pushed so heavily in the press. In the rest of the world, they did NOT SEE THE DROPPED CALL issue at all. So where was the antenna problem??? IT SIMPLY DID NOT EXIST!
The issue was solely limited to AT&T and it's poor quality network in certain markets... mostly in cities where NIMBYS had prevented the buildout of new cell towers... particularly New York, San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and other metro areas, where the heavy data usage of the iPhone 3G network demand overwhelmed the system's ability to carry the sheer numbers of people wanting to use to system.
The specialists in cell phone testing all tweaked Consumers Reports, pointing out that they did not know what they were doing in their "tests" and also pointed out that they did not even use proper test equipment... using the iPhone's own five bar signal strength meter as their "sophisticated" test equipment to show how strong the signal it was receiving was. The did not test real world calls at all... just squirted signals at it... Nor did they test ANY OTHER of the cell phones in their samples for signal attenuation, just the iPhone. Why? Was their an agenda?
Let me propose an analogy.
When I was a kid I had a transistor radio, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Like every radio, it has a speaker. The sound comes out of the speaker. If the speaker is covered, it sounds weak and horrible. But if you hold it right, the speaker is open to the air, and it sounds good.
Depending on how you held it, your fingers or palm could either a) cover the speaker, or b) not cover the speaker.
Nobody back then made a Big Freakin' Deal out of the fact that if you held it in such a way as to cover the speaker, it sounded like drek.
Instead, they said, "Well, don't hold it that way, duh!!"
I fail to understand how people don't see that the iPhone4 antenna issue, which revolves around a well-known characteristic of antennas, is any different.
The antenna issue was real, but so was the "speaker issue". As a kid, it was obvious to me how to avoid it.
How did people get so much stupider in 40 years?
No one's lying. They're just describing a subjective experience in ways that are influenced by everything they've read about the "grip of death." Furthermore, I'd wager that your wife's retelling is also a subjective report influenced by what "everybody knows."
None of these TAs has a case on their iPhones, which eliminates the issue?