I'm an iPhone 4 owner and I don't think I've experienced this problem, am I in a minority here? The phone is an incredible piece of tech. Don't punish people for innovation or we will all be walking around with worse devices.
I don't think you're the minority. All of my friends that have gotten the phone haven't had any problems with the antenna and when I actually ask others, they report no antenna issues either. People that are displeased with something will (almost) always be louder than those that aren't.
They could make changes to future production runs however (assuming it really is a widespread issue which I'm still not really convinced of)
I've only been able to reproduce it in areas where the signal was awful to begin with. In areas where my 3gs drops calls weekly, using other people's 4's I can reproduce a dropped call with some regularity. My guess is that it's so hard to reproduce because even by attenuating the signal by holding it wrong, a lot of users are in an area where the signal is strong enough that it doesn't matter.
Anandtech had an interesting article where they showed both the 3GS and 4g having problems based on how you hold it. With the 4g's worst case being better than the 3GS's worst case, however the loss was more dramatic so the perception is worse even though the device is significantly improved.
I don't think Apple is planning on fixing it, as that would require a massive recall. Take it back and wait for iPhone 5.
If Apple has to they will give everyone who complains a free "bumper" case. Those things will probably cost Apple less than a dollar. I'm thinking of just buying bumpers preemptively, since they will also solve the vital "which of these otherwise identical iPhones is my wife's phone and which is mine?" problem.
They seem reluctant to give cases away, which is a bizarre move, imho. A few thousand or tens of thousands of cases would sweep this ongoing PR bleed under the rug, simple-dimple. That is, until the lawyers get into it. Then it gets legs of its own, can go on for eons, and there is the very real possibility of a document subpoena revealing some mention of the possibility of the problem by an engineer which can be spun up into punitive fines.
I'm convinced all this noise being made over the iPhone 4 "defects" is a very sophisticated PR push by Apple's competitors. My iPhone 4 hasn't dropped any more calls than my 3GS did. Maybe it's just me.
If they were actually that sophisticated, they'd be making better products.
It's only been out a week or so... If you are unhappy with your iPhone then bring it back to the store and get a full refund. Simple. This culture of lawsuits baffles me.
The Xbox also had class action lawsuits filed regarding "red ring of death" issue, but at least you can still use your iPhone with this issue.
This is what irks me about the description of the iPhone's antenna as a "fatal design flaw". If there's a line between defective design as opposed to just a minor issue, it looks like the iPhone4's antenna suffers from the latter. Do we get class action lawsuits against Microsoft for Windows crashes? Or Android over its lousy music player? Do those flaws get this much attention? Why not just sue AT&T for dropped calls? It's essentially the same result as the iPhone antenna problem.
Is it so much to ask to just hold it different? There is no way they will win this case.
Surely, no way they can win this. They know, where the flaws lie and to what length they have to go to fix it. So, they are using the hush-hush policy.