Iphone 4 – antennagate

I have been amazed that supposed issues with an antenna of ‘a’ cellphone have caused such an outbreak of (bad) publicity in all news media in the past weeks. Ok, ok, it is not just ‘a’ cellphone…afterall it is THE iPhone 4! 😉

Still, I really don’t see why this can be *so* important…so important that a U.S. Senator decided to write a letter about it to Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, so important that it is worth mentioning at all in the 5 o’clock news, so important that ‘the world’ is falling over Apple and its shares dropped 4%…hell, someone even made a song about it (even though that one takes things a more in perspective, it almost looks like Apple planted it itself! 😉 )

By now we know that Apple acknowledges that there is something there and offers a free case for all iPhone 4 owners. At the same time they state that the ‘problem’ it’s by *far* not as big as media wants everyone to believe: only 0.55% of iPhone 4 users have contacted AppleCare regarding antenna or reception issues, just 1.7% of iPhone 4s are returned to AT&T (which is lower than the 6% of iPhone 3GS’s that were returned in its early days) and lastly, AT&T is reporting that there is just a minor increase in dropped calls with iPhone 4 compared to iPhone 3GS (less than one more call per 100 placed calls is dropped).

My take on it?

There is definitely something there, it ain’t all *that* big, Apple is currently doing damage control and will silently change the iPhone 4 hardware in the coming months.

PS.

Dave Winer ‘stole’ the subject line that I planned for this blog post (‘It’s just a phone‘) yesterday. Oh well, I guess I should have written my piece on Thursday, as I intended to do! 😉

I do however totally agree with ‘uncle’ Dave; “On Friday, Apple asked us to believe that the iPhone is just a phone. It’s just like the phones that Nokia and RIM make, or Samsung or Motorola. Nothing special about it. That may be the single most important thing they said, and I’m not even sure they know they said it.”