Consumer Reports, the product-testing organization, has declared the iPhone 4S "recommended." Its predecessor, you may remember, had this award withheld thanks to some antenna issues which affected few people in daily use, and are also a feature of pretty much any cellphone, ever.
"Apple it seems has remedied the 'death grip'" says Consumer Reports' James McQueen, adding that "the 4S doesn’t suffer the same reception problem [as the iPhone 4]." If you remember, the Antennagate fiasco was caused by some people losing reception bars on their iPhone's when they touched the bottom left corner of the antenna strip wrong.
Consumer Reports gained quite a bit of publicity from this when it refused to upgrade its rating to 'recommended,' even after Apple "fixed" the problem by changing the way the reception bars were displayed. Actual consumers roundly ignored this advice and turned the iPhone 4 into the fastest selling phone, like, ever.
Apple's new antenna-switching tech, which can flip the various antennae between transmit and receive as needed, are likely responsible for the elimination of the problem in the iPhone 4S, but that still isn't enough for Consumer Reports. The iPhone 4S may have gotten the Recommended label, but it still isn't good enough "to allow the iPhone 4S to outscore the best new Android-based phones in our Ratings."
Which phones beat it? The Samsung Galaxy S II and the Motorola Droid Bionic, among others. And the winning features? Consumer Reports rated these phones higher because they "boast larger displays than the iPhone 4S and run on faster 4G networks."
Those would be the larger screens that make the phones impossible to fit in pockets, and the 4G radios that site idle waiting for the networks to erect some 4G cell towers.
Still. One amazing feature of the Droid Bionic makes me think I'll never buy an iPhone 4S. What is it? What's the feature that pushes this handset to the very top echelons of the CR charts? "Excellent keypad readability under most lighting conditions."
Consumer Reports recommends the iPhone 4S [Consumer Reports. Thanks, James!]
