Consumer Reports can’t recommend the iPhone 4

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.

We reached this con­clu­sion after test­ing all three of our iPhone 4s (pur­chased at three sep­a­rate retail­ers in the New York area) in the con­trolled envi­ron­ment of CU’s radio fre­quency (RF) iso­la­tion cham­ber. In this room, which is imper­vi­ous to out­side radio sig­nals, our test engi­neers con­nected the phones to our base-station emu­la­tor, a device that sim­u­lates car­rier cell tow­ers (seevideo: IPhone 4 Design Defect Con­firmed). We also tested sev­eral other AT&T phones the same way, includ­ing the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss prob­lems of the iPhone 4.

Our find­ings call into ques­tion the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4’s signal-strength issues were largely an opti­cal illu­sion caused by faulty soft­ware that “mis­tak­enly dis­plays 2 more bars than it should for a given sig­nal strength.”

The tests also indi­cate that AT&T’s net­work might not be the pri­mary sus­pect in the iPhone 4’s much-reported sig­nal woes.

We did, how­ever, find an afford­able solu­tion for suf­fer­ing iPhone 4 users: Cover the antenna gap with a piece of duct tape or another thick, non-conductive mate­r­ial. It may not be pretty, but it works. We also expect that using a case would rem­edy the prob­lem. We’ll test a few cases this week and report back.

The sig­nal prob­lem is the rea­son that we did not cite the iPhone 4 as a “rec­om­mended” model, even though its score in our other tests placed it atop the lat­est Rat­ings of smart phones that were released today.

The iPhone scored high, in part because it sports the sharpest dis­play and best video cam­era we’ve seen on any phone, and even out­shines its high-scoring pre­de­ces­sors with improved bat­tery life and such new fea­tures as a front-facing cam­era for video chats and a built-in gyro­scope that turns the phone into a super-responsive game con­troller. But Apple needs to come up with a permanent—and free—fix for the antenna prob­lem before we can rec­om­mend the iPhone 4.

[UPDATE: Some com­men­tary sug­gests we’ve retracted an ear­lier rec­om­men­da­tion of the iPhone 4. In fact, our first blog on the iPhone 4’s per­for­mance, and a fol­lowup com­par­ing it to the Motorola Droid X, were based on pre­lim­i­nary test­ing, as we stated. Those ear­lier tests did not address antenna per­for­mance. We rec­om­mend prod­ucts only after all tests are com­plete, and as part of our full smart phone Rat­ings. —Paul Reynolds]

If you want an iPhone that works well with­out a masking-tape fix, we con­tinue to rec­om­mend an older model, the 3G S. (The full list of rec­om­mended smart phones mod­els appears as part of our lat­est Rat­ings, avail­able to subscribers.)

—Mike Gikas

Posted in the Con­sumer Reports