iPhone 4 antenna issues not nearly as real as Verizon Droid 2 antenna issues

Remember the supposed iPhone 4 “antenna issue” that turned out to be affecting virtually no one and was revealed to have been little more than a manufactured controversy on the part of geek tech pundits who favor Verizon’s Droid platform over the iPhone? That particular stunt turns out to have backfired in the worst way imaginable for Droid fanatics, as it turns out the new Droid 2 does in fact have major antenna and reception issues – none of which are related to how you hold it.

Whereas the entirety of the iPhone 4 “antennagate” controversy was that you could get the signal strength to slightly reduce if you purposely held it with a specific finger pattern (in other words, only if you were intentionally trying to reduce your signal strength for the sake of generating headlines), it turns out the Droid 2 can’t keep a consistent antenna signal even when you’re not touching it at all. Reports from TechCrunch, Engadget, Apple Insider, et al, reveal the Droid 2 to suffer from “endlessly fluctuating bar counts” when it comes to antenna signal strength. Apple CEO Steve Jobs offered data which shows that a user can slightly reduce the signal strength of any cellphone (including all of the iPhone’s smartphone competitors) by working to identify a weak spot and then purposely grabbing it by the weak spot, which only served to underline the fact that it’s not a “defect” if it’s something you have to be purposely trying to make go wrong. But these widespread reports of the Verizon Droid 2 having antenna and reception issues of their own accord, as opposed to a “problem” that has to be manipulated in order to occur, suggest that the Droid 2 is in for a level of controversy ten times that which the iPhone 4 faced over its minor, not-actually-affecting-anyone antenna controversy of last month.

But then again, let’s not forget that the iPhone 4 antenna controversy was started by Gizmodo, who had just seen one of its editors’ houses raided by the police after the publication came into possession of an iPhone 4 prototype. And let’s not forget that tech journalists in general come from a place of hardcore geekdom such that they despise Apple’s consumer-first philosophy even if they use Apple products themselves. And let’s not look past the fact that the Verizon Droid is based on the geek-oriented anarchist Android platform, which was developed by Google, a company which is every bit as much pro-geek and anti-consumer as Apple is pro-consumer and anti-geek. In other words, the iPhone 4 antenna controversy happened because the people who were in a position to make it happen see Apple as a threat to their continued way of geek-oriented life, and some of them just couldn’t resist the opportunity to try to taint the iPhone 4 in the eyes of the public, even if it meant destroying their own credibility in the process.

To their credit, several geek-oriented publications are at least having the guts to report on the Droid 2 antenna problems. But seeing how these appear to be actual antenna problems as opposed to the iPhone’s imaginary ones, we’ll see whether the geekdom now does the right thing by making it clear to the public that this is in fact a real problem whereas the last one they hyped up was something they invented. Something says it’s doubtful that the geek press will make such a hype-fest out of the Droid 2 antenna issues that Verizon’s CEO will have to call a press conference and explain to the world what’s really going on, but perhaps we should give the geek tech press the benefit of the doubt before assuming that they’ll do the wrong thing. In any case, here’s why Verizon’s future lies not with the Droid but with the Verizon iPhone.