⇥ What antenna problem?

It took six hours of standing in line on an uncharacteristically cold summer night¹, but I finally have an iPhone 4, which means that I can tell you the truth about the antenna problem: I have no idea what these people are talking about.

I live in an area where my provider has reasonably good signal, with four bars on both my old 3G and the new handset. As shown countless times by countless talking heads on countless media outlets, if i touch one of the black gaps on the side of the phone, the number of bars decreases to two, but I haven’t noticed any degradation in either data rates or voice in day-to-day usage. In areas where there is less signal (like, ironically, my local Apple Store), I can make the signal go down to a single bar or no bars, though this still doesn’t affect my ability to make phone calls in a manner that is substantially different from my old phones; in other words, I honestly can’t see any difference and, had there not been so much noise made about this issue, I likely would have never noticed.

It almost looks like the press has latched on to this problem—in my eyes completely irrelevant—and keeps picking at it the way one picks at a scab that’s healing. It’s the itch that some people just don’t seem to be able to let go of and, frankly, it seems like a pretty small problem to be so worked up about.

Now, if the press really had wanted something to complain about, they certainly could have spent a few words on the way Apple has handled the launch of the iPhone 4. It’s been a complete disaster, at least here. Far from being the smooth even that one would have expected from a company that, say, has launched three of these before, the whole affair bordered on the ridiculous: Apple’s website had no information until the morning of the launch and, were it not for press leaks and a small sign that appeared at the entrance of the stores in the days before the launch, there was no official confirmation that a phone was coming on July 30th, or what the pricing would be. To top it off, the Rogers activation system was down most of the morning—because, you know, it’s not like they were handling a major launch or anything.

I can’t speak for what happened south of the border, but based on what my friends told me, things weren’t that much smoother there, either—particularly for those decided to forego pre-orders and stood in line so that they could get their handset early on the morning, only to find out that many of those who had pre-ordered theirs had, in fact, received the phone the day before the official launch.

Of course, one can say that it’s just a hiccup. Or—excuse me while I laugh—that the company was so overwhelmed by demand that it couldn’t handle the load. But, honestly, who buys that? An organization like Apple isn’t “caught off-guard,” and certainly not twice in a row². This is a publicity move, pure and simple. Apple wants the big lines and the impression of tight supply to drive media coverage—and, of course, the latter laps it up without ever questioning how a multi-billion dollar company can’t seem to launch their flagship product in a way that doesn’t upset so many customers³.

This said, the iPhone 4 is a beautiful device. The construction feels solid—dense, even, as if you’re holding a device that is packed to the gills and has absolutely no empty space inside. The screen, as advertised and widely reported is that good. Pictures look like they have been painted on the glass, rather than being generated by a screen underneath it. And speed, especially coming from a 3G, is quite simply amazing. The phone itself seems to have improved considerably: I no longer have trouble having a conversation with someone on my home line, which probably precedes the discovery of America and therefore tends to attenuate the signal slightly, and the Prius’s Bluetooth handsfree no longer sounds like the Hypnotoad while undergoing a colonoscopy while I wait for a call to engage. Oh, and FaceTime is loads of fun, too.