Apple Design FAIL

Apple's iPhone 4 seems to have some serious problems with its antenna, to the point where it drops calls if you put your hand on the wrong part of the phone. Steve Jobs got a lot of attention when he said users were holding the phone wrong.

This is marketing fail dialed up to 11. Just how bad is it? Nokia has a blog post showing all the ways you can hold your Nokia phone:

We’ve found any of the four grips mentioned above to be both comfortable and as you can see, offer no signal degradation whatsoever. This isn’t a feature you’ll only find on high-end Nokia devices either. It’s something that’s been a part of pretty much every Nokia device ever made (perhaps with the exception of that teardrop 3G one, which was a bit ridiculous).

The key function on any Nokia device is its ability to make phone calls.

"You're holding it wrong?" How about you're marketing it wrong?

Eric Raymond looks at this from a more systemic angle, but drips the same contempt for Apple's ham-fisted efforts - and the predictable "it's insanely great!" response from the fanboys:

It never looked very likely that the iPhone line would recover the unit share advantage against Android that it lost earlier this year. Now Apple has taken a serious hit to their brand image and they’ll be lucky not to watch their share drop like a rock. And there’s no one else Apple can blame; they launched the iPhone 4 with serious user-visible software errors and (on the evidence of those job postings) knowing the antenna design was defective. Apple owns every failure.

In the future, the Apple fanboys trumpeting the “superior user experience” among my commenters will be pointed to this post and mocked without mercy. Your god has failed you, even in the terms it set itself as the criteria of excellence. The iPhone 4 now stands for lies and incompetence.

If Nokia wanted to really stick the knife in, they'd turn their blog post into a Flash podcast. You'd be able to view it on your Nokia phone, but not your iPhone. Nice user experience.