Hello,
I new here and this is my first post. Let me just say that none of you know me from Adam and I understand if you choose not to receive this message. Let me get on with it by saying that I am very familiar with issues such as this. I also own a iPhone 4 and have experienced the issue personally. However, I would caution anyone who thinks that this problem is absolutely a hardware issue not to jump to that conclusion prematurely. I'll try to briefly explain why.
An iPhone isn't much different from your typical electronic gadget these days. Underneath that beautifully designed exterior, or "mechanicals" you have a processor, PCB, memory, antenna ect. All of the "hardware" that makes the device do things we enjoy so much. That hardware is controlled by software that sits on top of a kernel and driver layer that acts as an interface. Because the antenna is DESIGNED to be in contact with the user, and there is no way it wasn't, then you can bet Apple has done a lot of extensive testing of this product to ensure this kind of problem doesn't exist IN HARDWARE. By that I mean there are specific test cases that would test the performance of the hardware against these kinds of conditions. But let's dig a little deeper into what's going on. Bear with me as I'm trying not to get very technical with the language.
The signal comes in and is detected by the antenna. This signal is being amplified and then converted from anologue to digital and passes to the processor. But there are other things to consider like interference. If interference is also allowed in then it can do a lot of things that could cause issues like what we see here. So ideally, you filter out the noise/interference which doesn't necessarily have to come from outside the device so that your signal to noise ratios is acceptable. Filters are not always hardware either. If there is a driver issue or problem in the OS itself, it could easily cause problems like this. Now I'm not saying that I know for a fact something like this is going on. Only that it's possible. Remember, noise is always there. Other RF signals, internal components or even from contact with your hard! A bad design can do this. But so too can software or drivers that are not properly written to handle the noise. Like a bad tuning algorithim for instance.
So with all that babble I just wrote in mind, Steve may really be hinting to a fix. The bottom line is we just don't know. What I do know from experience is it's highly unlikely that if this was a true HW issue that any of us would have our iPhone 4's as Apple would certainly have known about this before release and redesigned. The risk to their brand name is too great otherwise. Now considering that the launch date was approaching, it's also possible that the pressure to get product out was such that they figured the risk of deploying the device with a bug was within acceptable limits and that a quick software update to address the problem would be forth coming soon enough after launch to make this a non issue.
