Consumer Reports Finds Antenna Issue on Verizon iPhone

The Verizon iPhone 4's network settings menu. Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Consumer Reports claims the Verizon iPhone 4 exhibits signal loss when held in a specific way, similar to the problems seen in the AT&T iPhone 4 last year.

Never mind that Consumer Reports was initially hasty to downplay concerns about AT&T iPhone 4 antenna issues last year without doing testing of its own, only to completely flip-flop after running some lab tests and concluding that the antenna design was seriously flawed.

Now Consumer Reports says it has put the Verizon iPhone through the same lab tests inside a radio-frequency isolation chamber and found that the Verizon iPhone 4, too, may lose its connection when held “in a specific but quite natural way,” in areas with weak signal conditions.

“For that reason, we are not including the Verizon iPhone 4 in our list of recommended smartphones, despite its high ranking in our Ratings,” Consumer Reports said in its report.

In an episode famously named “Antennagate,” many early iPhone 4 customers in 2010 reported that covering the lower-left antenna band of the handset caused significant signal loss, or at worst, dropped calls. Bad press about the AT&T iPhone 4’s antenna design escalated to the point that Apple had to hold a press conference to address the issue.

CEO Steve Jobs explained to journalists that every smartphone has “weak spots” that may cause signal attenuation when held in a certain way. Apple found that keeping a protective case around the iPhone 4 decreased the likelihood of signal loss, so the company started a temporary free-case program for customers experiencing the issue.

However, in Consumer Reports lab tests, the iPhones were the only smartphones that exhibited signal loss when touched with a finger in a specific place (the lower left corner, where two different external metal antennas are separated by a thin black band).

Despite the wave of negative commentary on the antenna, the iPhone 4 was Apple’s best-selling handset ever, with 14.1 million iPhones sold in the fourth quarter of 2010.

In other words, even though wishy-washy Consumer Reports doesn’t recommend the Verizon iPhone, people are probably still going to buy it anyway.

In my review of the Verizon iPhone, I found that its call quality and reliability were superior to that of the AT&T iPhone’s. However, data transfers were significantly slower than AT&T’s, making the AT&T iPhone better for media consumption (watching Netflix, downloading apps, etc.) while the Verizon iPhone is superior for phone calls.