iPhone 4 early adopters: just beta testers for Apple?

By Richi Jennings. June 24, 2010.

It's the official Apple iPhone 4 release date and already the problem reports are rife. Some users are wondering if they're little more than beta testers for Steve Jobs. Antenna problems, yellow spots, and scratched/broken screens make for unhappy fanbois, it would appear...
 

Antenna problems abound: users are complaining that signal strength drops like a stone when they touch the external antenna -- the metal strip around the edge of the phone. Typically this causes 3G or Wi-Fi data bandwidth to plummet or even for calls to fail.

Excuse me, who didn't see this coming? Does nobody ever remember adjusting an FM radio antenna and finding the signal changed if you merely touched it? What did Apple's product designers expect?

Antennas are designed for optimum efficiency at radiating and receiving RF at the required frequency band(s). Part of that design is the shape, another part is getting the correct impedance (which, if I remember correctly, is a three-dimensional imaginary number). Touching an antenna is going to change its characteristics, depending on your skin dampness, build, footwear, design of the floor, what you had for breakfast, and a hundred other factors.

I've lost count of the number of users posting to MacRumors and Gizmodo that seem surprised about this. This used to happen with good old external antenna-equipped phones; it was even common with the original iPhone, if you held it at the bottom of the unit.
 

Yellow spots and display banding: Jesus Diaz is collecting a ton of reports of uneven screen discoloration. Mainly described as yellow spots or yellow bands.

This again? Didn't we just go through this with iMacs? Hopefully this time it won't take the best part of four months for Apple to admit there's a problem.
 

Scratched and broken screens: once again, I could hardly be less surprised.

Describing the iPhone 4 screen as "ultradurable" is something of a hostage to fortune, no? Especially as there appears to be a design flaw.

Jonny has more on the issues. 

 
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