Yikes. First Consumer Reports went ahead and said that the antenna issues in iPhone 4 are no big deal. Now they are saying that they can no longer recommend the iPhone 4 solely for that reason. Consumers Reports too had issues with holding the iPhone 4 a certain way and losing reception, and goes as far as to question Apple's claim that the antenna issues are a software issue.

When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone's lower left side-an easy thing, especially for lefties-the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you're in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can't recommend the iPhone 4. We reached this conclusion after testing all three of our iPhone 4s (purchased at three separate retailers in the New York area) in the controlled environment of CU's radio frequency (RF) isolation chamber. In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers. We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.

I'd like to point out that Apple never claimed the antenna issues were a software issue. They simply claimed that the iPhone 4's way of displaying signal bars was a software issue. They never made any official statement on the actual hardware, and they probably should soon. Also, if Consumer Reports initially went ahead and recommended the phone clearly before any in-depth testing, why should we believe them now in their new report? Because they are basically announcing what everybody else already knew?

Enough of these reports of antenna issues. What we need now is for Apple to jump into the situation. The hardware situation.