iPhone 4 Problems Comes Early

Apple’s latest jesus phone, the iPhone 4 was released in the United States today, and already reported problems are starting to pile up.

The biggest reported bug with the iPhone 4 is said to be a reception issue when you hold the phone. Users say that when they touch the phone, the signal drops by anything up to 3 bars, and returns when they take their hands off it.

But what makes this somewhat bizarre is that the problem primarily occurs if you’re left handed. It would appear that the primary antenna in the iPhone 4 is on the left hand side of the phone; a left handed user would place the phone in the palm of their hand with the phone touching on the left side.

The iPhone 4′s new glass is also under fire, with users reporting that it’s too easy to break: I’m sure if you dropped an older model it would break as well, but the word is that the iPhone 4 is far easier to break.

The glass, which also appears for the first time on the back of the phone, is said to scratch far more easily that previous models, although without a test unit we can’t confirm that.

The new “retina display” is reported to be having some problems, with some reports suggesting that users are getting yellow dots and splotches stuck on the screen.

Last but not least, the iPhone 4′s “Facetime” video phone software is under fire from privacy activists because calls made using the app aren’t secure. Video calls made using Facetime could in theory be intercepted if being made over an unsecure WiFi network.

Any new phone Apple has ever released has come in for criticism for some reason or another, so we’re taking the claims so far with a grain of salt, however the number of them might suggest that Apple may, at the very least, have some quality control issues with the phone.

Apparently so.

iPhone 4 users are reporting en masse that their new handsets suffer a significant loss of signal strength when the phone’s antenna is touched with bare skin. Unfortunately, it is pretty much impossible to use a caseless iPhone 4 without touching the antenna, because the steel band that runs around the entire outside of the case is the antenna. To avoid touching it you’d somehow have to pinch the front and back of the phone between two fingers.

The phenomenon is so widespread that it may be nearly universal. Gizmodo has over a dozen videos showing the phenomenon, and tech blogs from Wired to Engadget are up in arms about it.

What’s going on is a bit of a mystery. Surely Apple tested the iPhone 4 before releasing it, and with a problem this serious, testers should have noticed the issue. (Then again, iOS 4 multitasking got out of the door without being fully baked, so who knows.) On the other hand, beta iPhone 4 units were famously kept in a mock iPhone 3GS sleeve, so perhaps only limited testing was done with bare units.

Wired offers a semblance of an explanation as to why this phenomenon is happening: When you touch a TV antenna, the picture changes because, in a nutshell, your body becomes part of the antenna construct. The mystery is that with a TV, touching the antenna usually improves the picture, whereas with the iPhone 4, it makes things worse. My best guess is that the radio frequencies used for TV are more conducive to the human body than a cell phone’s frequencies are.

Apple has also acknowledged some bugs with the way the phone detects and manages signal strength. It says those bugs will be fixed soon, so hopes are high that a firmware update will solve the problem.

Meanwhile, it appears that adding a case to the phone will improve or eliminate the issue, and Lord knows there are plenty of those on the market already.