iPhone 4 antenna and problems mar Apple product debut

The Apple iPhone 4

Apple's long awaited iPhone 4 is out today, and a long line formed near Apple's Flagship Stores in New York and San Francisco, and around America and the World. The iPhone, an innovative cell phone that's changed the way such devices are developed, has a number of new features that have created a lot of excitement. But the Apple IPhone 4 also has bugs with its antenna and other features that have marred it's debut.

The most exciting new feature on the iPhone 4 is the ability to created and edit high-definition video, which you can then upload to YouTube. This makes the iPhone the first smart phone designed for video-blogging use and can change the face of media. On Wednesday night ABC News Nightline featured an impressive segment that was shot entirely using the iPhone 4.

The other cool feature is video phone calling: the ability to talk to a person and see their face as they talk. It's a wild feature that calls into question how concerns about how teen "sexting" will morph into a concern about what this space will call "sexviding" or the act of one making a video phone call just to send a sexy video of themselves to the other person. (More on that later.)

But beyond launching a new teen social trend (and the prediction here is that "sexviding" will be that trend), the iPhone 4 also has a few problems. The most noted one is the issue of the antenna.

The tech blog Gizmodo notes that the iPhone 4 loses reception when you hold it by the antenna band, which happens to be the way you normally hold the phone. Gizmodo presented this YouTube video by Fame Foundry which shows the problem:



The antenna band is wrapped around the sides of the phone, so when you hold it, you're bound to touch the band, and cause the AT&T (man I hate AT&T) reception bars to decrease to nil, meaning no reception. You have to hold the iPhone 4 by the glass, which is a weird way to handle the product, to get reception.

Gizmodo asked users to confirm the problem by making their own video and that's what has happened. Thus, the Apple iPhone 4 is such that you can't use it effectively by holding it. It seems Apple could have installed a retractable antenna, rather than one that part of the phone's casing. Illogical. (As a note, Gizmodo has various fixes for iPhone users, the most effective one being scotch tape.)

The other problem most noted is with a "yellow spot problem" on the screen that Apple reports will go away within a day "or so."  The reason given is apparently that Apple was so busy rushing the iPhone to delivery that a kind of bonding agent was not given enough time to evaporate.

Stay tuned.