Apple iPhone 4 press conference in a nutshell

16. Jul, 2010 | by Adriana Lee 0 Comments

Some people love absorbing every word or pause in a speech. Others just want to know the bottom line. If you’re in the latter camp, here’s the end user’s bottomline outcome of all this, summed up:

Free cases: Jobs did not apologize, but did say “we’re not perfect,” which is as close to an apology as he’d ever to put out there. (He also says no smartphone is perfect, and brought up some examples of other phones showing signal loss when gripped a certain way, like the Blackberry Bold 9700, the Samsung Omnia and the Droid Eris.) But he does admit that the iPhone 4 drops slightly more calls than the 3GS. (Less than 1 per 100 calls.) So to please customers, the company is going to offer free cases to anyone who bought/buys an iPhone 4 through September 30. (The cases presumably protect against signal loss.) He did not mention how to get them yet. But if you already bought a Bumper from Apple, keep your eyes on the news. You’re going to get a full refund of your purchase amount, so stay tuned to find out how.
The company has acknowledged the proximity sensor issue and is working on a fix.
The White iPhone 4 has been confirmed as coming at the end of July.

(If you want the juicy details, hop on over to this post, which includes moment-by-moment event coverage, plus highlights from the Q&A.)

Reactions are diverse across the web. Some people were surprised by Apple’s admission and were satisfied by the “make-good” attempt with the free cases. Others think this was a really lame press conference that didn’t offer enough details on how Apple planned to fix the signal issues. What’s your take on it?