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Apple Responds to iPhone 4 Complaints: You're Holding It Wrong

by Amar Toor on June 25, 2010 at 09:50 AM

holding it wrong

Having trouble finding a signal with your new iPhone 4? Apple says it's probably your own fault.

As it turns out, if you hold the phone in a way that blocks the iPhone's bottom left-hand corner, you might experience technical difficulties. Responding by e-mail to a frustrated iPhone 4 user and Engadget reader, Steve Jobs reportedly said, "Just avoid holding it that way."

Engadget contacted Apple regarding the issue, and Apple responded in an ever-so pedantic way:
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. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone... If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.
For a bit of comic relief, the crew at Reddit dug through Apple's official iPhone 4 advertisement videos and uncovered countless models holding the iPhone 4 "incorrectly."

For the record, Engadget's testers haven't reported any problems with the new smartphone's reception; in fact, they found it more reliable than any of the iPhone's previous incarnations. As you can see in this video from 2008, the iPhone 3G was prone to much the same problem. Other users, however, are clearly having issues, and Apple doesn't appear eager to accept responsibility for them. There are any number of twisted things you could do to a phone to hinder its signal, and, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, all the people can't hold their smartphones right all the time. But, if so many people are making the same egregious mistake, it's probably time for Jobs to man up and admit that his design team might have overlooked something, instead of throwing up his hands and then asking us to buy more of his "perfect" products. [From: Engadget and Reddit]

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Tags: Apple, cellphoneservice, complaints, iphone, Iphone4, reception, signal, SteveJobs, SteveJobsEmail, top

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