I have for a long time moaned about the ‘phone’ features in modern day smartphones and have tracked the trend of the major manufacturers as they attempt to cram more and more features into their smartphones at the expense of core functionality.

It is true that voice calling is a declining feature in our lives, but also something that is vitally important to many and also to everyone when they need it. If a company is going to make a smartphone, they have to live up to the name of the product and not ignore the phone part altogether. Nokia and RIM understand this and make smartphones that are great phones; good battery, great sound quality, signal and speakerphones. It’s not difficult; it has been done for many years and is far easier to implement than a Retina display or a sense overlay on top of Android.

It is getting better though and HTC and Apple have tried hard to produce smartphones with better antennas and improved voice quality. Samsung is producing some stunning devices with call quality that is unsurpassed and this trend is likely to carry on until the end of the year because new eye catching features are hard to come by at this time so they may as well improve what’s there and proclaim them to be radical.

Now, Apple has been getting a hard time over the past few weeks concerning the antenna and proximity sensor problems on the iPhone 4. The related headlines blow the problems up out of all proportion and you would think that using an iPhone 4 would kill you in under a minute if you listened to the likes of Giz (we are annoyed with Apple and will be negative at every opportunity) modo. However, these two problems are unforgivable.

Apple makes billions of dollars every quarter. The iPhone platform is driving much of this profit and leading to increased interest in Macs and all other aspects of the company. So many of Apples recent innovations have changed the mobile world and it has done incredibly well.

Apple did not test the iPhone 4 properly.

Whether you have experienced these problems or not, the fact is that Apple did not test the iPhone 4 as it should have done. Some say that the reason the ‘death grip’ issue did not come up was because the prototypes were hidden in cases to disguise them. That is not an excuse at all- how is it conceivable that it was not noticed? Even worse is the proximity sensor issue that I have experienced on almost every call so far. It completely destroys the voice feature of the i’PHONE’ 4 and again how could it have not been spotted. This worked fine on my 3GS so what went wrong here?

Apple rightly sits atop the mobile tree thanks to superior materials, innovation and marketing. Apple is incredibly quick at showing us how clever it is, but with cleverness often comes complacency and that is the only reason I can think of this to happen. Mobile phones are tested to destruction by mobile networks, manufacturers and network suppliers, but maybe the secrecy around a new iPhone meant that this cannot happen. I can almost guarantee than any mobile network provider would have picked up the antenna issue and that anyone who made a call on one would have picked up the proximity sensor issue.

Maybe the sensor issue is down to a bad batch, but it does seem to be a big batch. Maybe the antenna issue is not as bad as we all think, but it is disconcerting when you are aware of it. Now matter how great the iPhone 4 is, and it truly is, we have to face up to the fact that Apple dropped the ball more than once during testing.