I blogged about the iPhone 4 and its revolutionary new antenna design a little of a week ago and how it might be the future for antenna design for handsets. But I was concerned about how touching the antenna in different ways would affect its performance and how they designed for that.

Well, I guess the answer was they did not completely take that into account and now have reception issues with the iPhone 4. Various reports last week highlighted this issue including a user's e-mail directly to Steve Jobs in which he responded to the user saying well, if it does not work well when you hold it a certain way, don't hold it that way. Are you kidding me? The user has to avoid holding it in the lower left corner or buy a $30 case from Apple to solve a problem that no phone should have in the first place.

Here is a video (there are many of them now) demonstrating the phone showing 4 bars of reception strength without holding it and going to no reception if you hold it normally in the palm of your hand. It also shows that holding it without touch the side band where the antenna resides does not affect the reception. I am very surprised this was not discovered in testing and re-designed.