A friend in my office has the iPhone 4, and she was kind enough to let me fondle…ahem…I mean check it out. Though some of my friends goad me about either sit­ting on the fence about Apple, or being a flat-out Apple hater, noth­ing could be far­ther from the truth. I am actu­ally quite fond of Apple design and the sta­bil­ity of its prod­ucts. I am not a fan of the holier-than-thou atti­tude that Steve Jobs and some Apple devo­tees demonstrate.

So, with that out of the way, my first impres­sion of the phone is that it’s very attractive—in a very indus­trial way. How­ever, I think that it will appeal to a lot of peo­ple because it still rec­og­niz­ably an iPhone. The com­bi­na­tion of full-panel, rein­forced glass on both sides along with the brushed metal band gives the iPhone 4 the look and feel of qual­ity. It is one thing to see the phone in pic­tures, it’s another to see it in per­son. The iPhone 4 is nar­row and thin, but feels quite sub­stan­tial in your hand. Gone are most of the curves of the pre­vi­ous iPhones. When I saw the first leaked pho­tos, I was a lit­tle con­cerned that the square edges of the phone wouldn’t feel com­fort­able in your hand, but that is not an issue. The edges are rounded just enough, or maybe I should say smooth, that they don’t cre­ate creases in your hand that could pinch.

Since this was a friends phone, I didn’t delve much into the phone’s apps or try mak­ing calls, so this truly is a hands-on piece, not a thor­ough review. If I am able to get a lit­tle more time with another iPhone 4, I will write a follow-up piece. There are plenty of reviews with gal­leries of the iPhone 4, but I indulge me to show a images.

Given all the con­tro­versy about the antenna “death grip” prob­lems, I had to check that out. My friend said that she hasn’t had any prob­lems with recep­tion. I imme­di­ately noticed that she has a case on her phone. Sec­ondly, she’s right-handed. I am a lefty. I held the phone in place where I could get full recep­tion and held the phone in a way so as to not block the black strips/gaps on the metal frame. As you will notice in the pic­ture, I have five bars of signal.

I changed my grip on the phone as if I were hold­ing the phone when I’m on a call. (Remem­ber, I’m a lefty.) Within about 15–20 sec­onds the sig­nal dropped from five bars to one or no bars. At one point the sig­nal dropped com­pletely, but that only a few sec­onds. Most of the time I held the phone this way, the sig­nal hov­ered around one bar.

You will now see that I changed my grip and held the iPhone 4 with two fin­gers higher on the body and the sig­nal returns to five full bars.

I’m show­ing this not to run the iPhone 4 into the ditch. I sim­ply wanted to see for myself whether the antenna issue was real or media-driven hys­te­ria, as Steve Jobs would have us believe. I can say, with cer­tainty, that this antenna issue is real. I repeated the “death grip” in front of my friend in a dif­fer­ent loca­tion and, sure enough, the sig­nal dropped and then stayed around one bar. I hope that Apple does more than deflect, and offers up a real fix for this problem–not just a free case. The iPhone 4 is a beau­ti­ful phone, but poten­tially could get reduced to a good camera/camcorder or an upgraded iPod Touch if the phone com­po­nent doesn’t work. It’s kind of hard to call some­thing a smart­phone if the phone part doesn’t work properly.