The supposedly non-existing “Antennagate” continues!

During Steve Jobs’ opening speech at the impromptu Apple press conference Friday the Apple leader showed examples of other phones- namely the HTC Droid Eris, RIM Blackberry Bold 9700, and Samsung Omnia- having the exact same antenna issues when “held improperly.”  He showed pictures that clearly demonstrated that the iPhone 4 was not alone in its issues and specifically called out phone maker Nokia by saying, “You can go on the web and look at pictures of Nokia phones that ship with stickers on the back that say ‘don’t touch here’.”.  RIM and Nokia both issued statements over the weekend and now HTC and Samsung are crying foul.

HTC has fired back at Apple that antenna reception issues are not common among smart phones and that Apple should fix their own phones before dragging others in the dirt.  ”The reception problems are certainly not common among smartphones,” the company’s chief financial officer, Hui-Meng Cheng, said. “They apparently didn’t give operators enough time to test the phone.”

John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted a screenshot of the Droid Eris manual showing where the antenna is and stating that you should not touch it during use for optimum reception.  While this does prove that touching the antenna can cause issues, the antenna on the Eris is at the top of the phone where it may only be obscured by fingers.  It would have nothing to do with holding the phone in the crook of your left hand.

Samsung issued a statement saying it  ”hasn’t received significant customer feedbacks on any signal reduction issue for the Omnia II.”  I’d imagine if there were, then folks would have made note of this before the iPhone 4′s issues arose.  RIM called Apple on the carpet, dismissing Apple’s references as an “attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle.”  Nokia put forth Apple’s name in their statement, but they did call themselves “the pioneer in internal antennas” and noted that the antenna design “has been a core competence at Nokia for decades.”

I’m wondering if Jobs knew or even cared that there would be backlash at his words.  I’m becoming less and less interested in his snake oil.