Some iPhone 4 models dropping calls when held left-handed, including ours (video)

Of course, nothing looks as cool as the iPhone 4 on its own, but if you want to avoid the antenna problems and the shattering, you are going to need one of these. They are made of aluminum, and they have an interior liner that separates the metal from the antenna, insulating it. The manufacturer—the same who makes the beautiful Joule iPad stand—told me that their tests showed no interference whatsoever across all models of iPhone:

The Vapor4 is not cheap, although not as expensive as the beautiful exotic wood back replacement: The Vapor4 is $80. For $100 you also get the V4Carbon, a carbon fiber back plate that will further protect the iPhone 4 fragile glass back.

"Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength," wrote Apple. "Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don't know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place."

We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.