A person with direct knowledge of Apple’s plans said it would not announce a recall at a press conference scheduled for Friday at its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The person was not authorized to speak for Apple and asked to remain anonymous.The iPhone 4’s antenna is built into a steel bracket that surrounds the device. Soon after the phone went on sale, buyers complained that holding it a certain way caused reception problems. On Thursday, Apple denied a report in Bloomberg BusinessWeek that a senior Apple engineer and antenna expert had warned Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive, and other senior managers about problems with the antenna design last year. It did not comment further on the controversy.
One person with direct knowledge of the phone’s design said Thursday that the iPhone 4 exposed a longstanding weakness in the basic communications software inside Apple’s phones and that the reception problems were not caused by an isolated hardware flaw.
Instead, the problems emerged in the complex interaction between specialized communications software and the antenna, said the person, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
The person said the problems were longstanding but had been exposed by the design of the iPhone 4. All cellphones can be affected by the way a hand grips the phone, but well-designed communications software compensates for a variety of external factors and prevents calls from dropping, the person said.
Mr. Jobs did not learn about the software problem until after the iPhone 4 shipped last month, the person said.
The glitch could presumably be fixed with a software update, and it appears to be unrelated to one that affected the display of the phone’s signal strength.
Two weeks ago, Apple said that while looking into customer complaints about reception, it had discovered that a longstanding software bug was causing the iPhone 4 and its predecessors to display signal strength incorrectly. It promised a fix, which it released Thursday. But Apple continued to say that the iPhone 4 had better wireless performance than any previous iPhone.
Apple’s headaches mounted on Monday after Consumer Reports called into question the veracity of Apple’s response. The magazine said its testing had led it to conclude that the iPhone 4 suffered from a hardware design flaw. Consumer Reports said it could not recommend the device to its readers until Apple fixed the problem. In a seeming contradiction, Consumer Reports also said that despite the flaw, the iPhone 4 was the best smartphone it had tested.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, wrote an open letter to Mr. Jobs on Thursday demanding that Apple give customers a “permanent fix” to the problem at no cost.
Source - The New York Times
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