I have a new iPhone 4 and love it, and haven’t experienced any of the loss of signal issues many people have complained about. But now Consumer Reports say there’s a hardware problem with the phone’s antenna, and that Apple is BS’ing when it says that signal issues are due to a miscalculation in the signal strength indicator. Not good for Apple!

Here’s CR’s blog post:

Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. 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.

Apple’s explanation for the phone issue never felt quite right. It’ll be interesting to see what they say now.