'Can't Recommend' iPhone 4 – Consumer Reports
Jul 13, 2010 at 4:27 pm in News by LT Writer
Consumer Reports announced Monday that it can’t recommend the iPhone 4 due to problems with its reception. According to a story posted on Consumer Reports’ Web site, it is withholding the recommendation after its engineers found that when you touch the gap in the antenna on the phone’s lower left side, “the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal.”
The consumer gurus put out a blog Monday that added more evidence that the antenna design on the new phone is a big problem. “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,” writes Consumer Reports’ Mike Gikas.
They 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.
Source : Consumer Reports
