iPhone Problem? We Solved It!

Bumping our way to better phone calls

If you're following the iPhone 4 story, you've no doubt already heard the buzz, and maybe even watched a YouTube video or two:  The new phones are dropping calls, depending on how you hold them.  This sounds kind of preposterous, but we tried it with a couple of test models, and it's consistently true.  When you hold the new iPhone in a certain way, with your skin on the antenna in a certain place, the AT&T bars drop immediately.

Now, we don't have a physicist here in the newsroom (insert your favorite media joke here), but we do try a lot of things, and when we attached a rubber bumper (to protect the sides of your phone) to the "4," the problem went away.  We were able to call, and Face Connect, to our heart's content.

While talking to other early adopters, we didn't see all that many problems.  It's kind of like when you bring your car into the dealer, and it doesn't make the noise.  That, and the fact that most of the new iPhones just flat-out work fine when you get them.  But when we did talk to people with reception problems, most of them told us that by putting something between their skin and the antenna, the problem was solved.

Is this too simplistic?  Please let us know if you're having problems, or if your "4" is working just fine.  I can be reached, via Twitter, at @scottbudman.

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