I can't remember whether I read it elsewhere or on here, but there was apparently friction between AT&T and Apple on the first iPhone release because apple had used an infineon chipset which was more suited to europe where cell towers are much closer together. I'm not sure how accurate this is, then again both Andy and Cris are experiencing the antenna issues so I guess that it's not really a relevant fact.

I've been without an iPhone since the 18th of June and it's amazing how I've become reliant on it, my calendar is fairly important because I spend half my life at the hospital and all my appointment details live in there. The biggest loss for me was email, checking my email on the computer seemed like a step back into the dark ages, it's just so much more convenient doing it on the phone.

It's a shame that so many people are having such massive issues, because the phone is brilliant and at least for the meanwhile, it's working at least as well as my 3G did.

I don't think Apple have handled this quite as well as they could have, I think if they'd come out sooner and said "We're not sure why so many of you think you're having problems, we're looking into it" they may have avoided or at least minimised what happened in the 20 odd days following the release. Sure, they were over-exageratting the signal strength bars, but Jobs admitted that they knew that the antenna had an inherent weakness *from the start* and that "all smartphones exhibited it", they really could have said this the moment that things started to escalate.

One thing I know from the stuff we do at work is that RF is all magic, voodoo and pixie dust. As Jobs said, "we knew about it, but we didn't expect it to be such a big issue" (or words to that effect) - it's clear that they've underestimated just what the end users would see.

It'll be interesting to see what the next couple of months has instore.