Came across this review of the iPhone4.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/08/04/apple-iphone-hands-on.html

It starts

There’s really only one question people interested in Apple’s new iPhone 4 want answered: is the whole antenna problem really as bad as it has been made out to be? The short answer is no, it’s not.

I found it a good read.

Pretty much the same from The Age in Melbourne:

http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/iphone/iphone-4-threesome-the-definitive-review-20100804-117ta.html?autostart=1

Wow. They took every opportunity to mention the “crippled network in the US”.

I haven’t tried an iPhone 4, but the whole reception thing seems to make sense to me.

A number of years ago I had a three-month stint in Melbourne. My then Ericsson phone, which had never dropped a call in Wellington, required me to stand in line-of-sight with a cell-phone tower and hold my limbs in odd configurations to keep the number of bars above the barest minimum. There was a strong correlation to time of day, day of week and location.

Over the last year Telecom NZ, with its XT (W-CDMA?) network has been crashing badly, especially in the South Island. My understanding is that Telecom’s deal with Alcatel-Lucent only called for one main switch in Christchurch, when Alcatel-Lucent recommended three, knowing that growth in the new network would be high. This has hit Telecom’s share price quite strongly, and the CEO has been fronting on ads to tell everyone how good it now is.

So in light of that, with the higher population and population density of many cities in the US, and the saturation of cell-phones and high profile of Apple’s 3G products, is it possible that the network itself is a large factor in the reception problems? Maybe the network is effectively crippled.