“Apple offers free iPhone 4 cases”

Posted: 17 Jul 2010 02:28 AM PDT

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- A perfect iPhone? There's no app for that.

Apple Inc. will give free protective cases to buyers of its latest iPhone to prevent reception problems that occur when people cover a certain spot on the phone with a bare hand.

CEO Steve Jobs apologized yesterday to people who are less than satisfied with the iPhone4, even as he denied that it has an antenna problem that needs fixing.

"We're not perfect," Jobs said at a news conference. "Phones aren't perfect."

The more than 3 million people who have bought an iPhone4 can go to Apple's website starting late next week and sign up for a free case, he said. Apple can't make enough of its $29 "Bumper" cases for everyone, so the company will let people chose from several case styles.

New buyers through Sept.30 also will be eligible. Apple will send refunds to people who already bought a Bumper.

Jobs, expressing irritation with the critical coverage of the phone's reception problems, echoed an earlier statement from Apple that no cell phone gets perfect reception. He played a video showing competing phones, including a BlackBerry from Research in Motion, losing signal strength when held in certain ways. He talked for 45 minutes and took 45minutes of questions with Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, and Bob Mansfield, a senior Apple executive in charge of hardware engineering.

Phones usually have an antenna inside the body. In designing the iPhone4, Apple gambled on a new design, using parts of the phone's outer casing as the antenna. That saved space inside the body of the phone but meant that covering a spot on the lower left edge blocked the wireless signal.

Consumer Reports magazine said covering the spot with a case or even a piece of duct tape alleviates the problem. It refused to give the iPhone4 its "recommended" stamp of approval for that reason, and it urged Apple on Monday to compensate buyers and fix the problem.

Yesterday, in the company's first remarks after the magazine's report, Jobs said Apple was "stunned and upset and embarrassed."

Jobs said the iPhone4's antenna issue isn't widespread, with slightly more than five out of every 1,000 complaining to Apple's warranty service and less than 2percent returning the device.

"We're not feeling right now that we have a giant problem we need to fix," Jobs said. "This has been blown so out of proportion that it's incredible."

Analysts have criticized Apple's responses to reports of reception problems as dismissive. A curt note attributed to Jobs told one early iPhone buyer to either hold the phone a different way or buy a case.

Apple also has said the main problem is actually with software, not antenna design. Apple said it recently discovered that iPhones display more cell-phone signal "bars" than they should, leaving people who thought they had a strong signal frustrated by dropped calls. Apple issued a software update Thursday that it said would make the number of bars shown on the phone's face more accurate.

But Consumer Reports painted the problem as much broader. Yesterday, the magazine said the free cases were "a good first step toward Apple identifying and finding a solution for the signal-loss problem of the iPhone4."

Dan Hays, who focuses on telecommunications at management consulting firm PRTM, said it was striking that Jobs said the iPhone4 drops one more call out of 100 than the previous model, the 3GS. That doesn't sound like a big difference, but a typical U.S. phone drops only one to 1.5 calls per 100, so it could be that the iPhone4 drops nearly twice as many calls as the older model, Hays said.

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