Despite landing at the top of its latest smartphone ratings list, the Apple iPhone 4 will not receive a recommendation from Consumer Reports. With all the reports about reception issues, it should come as no surprise that this is the reason why the latest iPhone is losing out on the endorsement.
It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. 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. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.
Consumer Reports goes on to suggest that a “piece of duct tape or another thick, non-conductive material" over the antenna gap addresses the issue. Is there anything that duct tape does not fix?
Consumer Reports concludes:
Apple needs to come up with a permanent-and free-fix for the antenna problem before we can recommend the iPhone 4.
In the meantime, they continue to recommend the older Apple iPhone 3GS.