iPhone 4: Not really that good with WiFi

By now we’re all very familiar with the SNAFU that went on during Steve’s demo of the FaceTime video call feature on the iPhone 4.

During the botched up demo, Steve claims that that the over 570 WiFi hotspots in the room was interfering with all his iPhone 4s including the backups. From the videos we’ve seen, it appears that his bevy of iPhone 4s was having a difficult time getting connected to WiFi.

We find rather worrying and here’s why.

During his keynote Steve said that the iPhone 4 “is one of the most precise and beautiful things” Apple has ever made. He went on about how the iPhone 4 glass and steel construction was like and “an old Leica camera”. Well, old Leica camera has problems connecting to WiFi networks too.

The iPhone 4 has “extraordinary built quality” with a proprietary alloy stainless steel frame that doubles as an integrated antenna. This is, for smartphone, pretty heavy stuff. But unfortunately all the high tech stuff suffered stage fright during the iPhone 4’s unveiling.

This is perplexing because of all the 570 WiFi devices in the room, the only one that had a problem was the iPhone 4. Apple’s latest and greatest smartphone couldn’t latch on to a WiFi network and Jobs had a hardtime showing the audience how FaceTime worked. Even when he had successfully made the call, the video was laggy and patchy.

We’re not sure what’s the big deal with the 570 WiFi hotpsots, we were following the live blog feeds and they were uploading just fine. So what gives? Is the new iPhone suffering from reception problems?

Keep in mind that this is not the first time the iPhone is plagued with reception problems. The 3G and 3GS has an infamous for dropping and not receiving calls.

So are we looking at another Apple phone that’s going to be plagued with connectivity woes? Well, we’ll have to try it out to find out. But it does give us a cause to be concerned.