this is violence

Oh my god! Another Apple/Antenna blog post! I just made your day. You’re welcome.

Actually – this isn’t really about the iPhone antenna, at least not directly. Rather it’s about this page Apple put up today following their press conference.

Every smartphone has a cellular antenna. And nearly every smartphone can lose signal strength if you hold it in a certain way

I’m not sure what the right answer is for Apple in this scenario, but I feel fairly certain it’s not to say “the iPhone 4: just as bad as every other smartphone!” The page is a list of phones from Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung, along with an iPhone 4 and 3GS showing that iPhone performs no worse than those phones.

Apple is making the case that an iPhone whose phone function is similarly bad to every other phone is still the better device, and this is probably true. But it’s a coldly intellectual response that I’m not sure will resonate for an emotional customer base. For a brand like Apple, I’m not sure what is gained from even talking about other phones unless you’re talking about how much better you are.

It’s a small thing, and likely of no consequence to Apple. I’m not convinced that any amount of back and forth on something like antenna design is going to dissuade people from buy what is, if nothing else, an attractive phone. Frankly, at this point, there just isn’t a product on the market that represents a level of competition to the iPhone to render this kind of mistake meaningful.

Still, it seems strategically sloppy to me.

Also, this.