It all started as soon as Apple’s new iPhone hit the streets. Complaints started appearing on online forums and social networking sites that the new phone dropped its signal when it was held in a certain way.
Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs then responded calling the signal problem a “non issue” and advised worried users to “avoid holding it that way”.
“Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone” said Jobs.
“If you ever experience this on your Phone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases” he added.
The message from Steve Jobs was sent in an email to the Ars Technica news site and the contents of that email are now being propagated around the web.
Apple does sell a rubber bumper which protects the “sensitive area” on the bottom left hand side of the iPhone and this should solve the problem.
However, it doesn’t end there. Now, it seems that Steve Jobs may have changed his mind about the non issue.
According to MacRumours site, someone emailed Jobs about receiving a free bumper that would alleviate the reception problem on the iPhone and this time the reply was different.
“There are no reception issues. Stay Tuned” wrote Jobs.
This has led to speculation that Apple may be about to release a fix for the signal problem and that this could be imminent so stay tuned for a further update.
However, the biggest problem surrounding the iPhone isn’t the signal dropping or the yellow blotches on the screen that some users were reporting, but availability. Many stores in the US had sold out of the iPhone 4G within hours of it going on sale.
In the UK nearly every major network now has no stocks of the iPhone left including Vodafone and Orange and those that do are reporting very limited supplies.
Over 600,000 people tried to pre order the latest iPhone and Apple sold over 1.7 million iPhone 4G’s in 3 days.
“We apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply,” said Jobs in a statement.
