There are still many people who believe there is a defect in the iPhone 4's antenna, for instance.
You should have quit while you were ahead. The antenna fails, but the problem is fixed with a case. Furthermore , here's something else that I never saw anyone mention: The receiver has a terrible echo in some locations. Possibly because there is a rock cliff behind my house (I live on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, so the rocks are, shall we say, moist). I imagine that has something to do with the origin of the echo, but it's awfully close (the round-trip time for the radio signal would be imperceptible, so something else must be going on; if it was a tower problem I would think others would have mentioned it). I can fix the echo, sometimes by moving and other times by simply turning the phone.
I have an iphone 4. The others in my family have had or currently have iphones 1, 2, and 3. The iphones area all lousy as phones (my circa 2006 motorola Razr was a much better phone). The iphone rocks in many ways, but as a phone, no.
The reason there is no problem with the iphone 4 antenna is not that it is impossible to obscure the signal or cause signal loss, but because the new design pulls in signals better-- over all-- than the previous design. The issues you can cause it to have exist on other phones as well.
It is a better design than previous versions, yet people seem to think there is a defect that makes it worse.
I don't doubt there may be better phones out there, and as you note the results will vary by location, and I'd add, carrier.
The antenna apparently has more gain, but the design flaw was that its conducting parts were on the outside of the case. That's just asking for trouble in a hand-held device.
But they are apparently on top of it. As soon as the flurry of complaints came in, they posted a job opening for an antenna engineer!
You should have quit while you were ahead. The antenna fails, but the problem is fixed with a case. Furthermore , here's something else that I never saw anyone mention: The receiver has a terrible echo in some locations. Possibly because there is a rock cliff behind my house (I live on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, so the rocks are, shall we say, moist). I imagine that has something to do with the origin of the echo, but it's awfully close (the round-trip time for the radio signal would be imperceptible, so something else must be going on; if it was a tower problem I would think others would have mentioned it). I can fix the echo, sometimes by moving and other times by simply turning the phone.
I have an iphone 4. The others in my family have had or currently have iphones 1, 2, and 3. The iphones area all lousy as phones (my circa 2006 motorola Razr was a much better phone). The iphone rocks in many ways, but as a phone, no.