Edible Apple

Contradicting an earlier report from Bloomberg which stated that a senior Apple engineer had told senior Apple executives about the potential for reception problems on the iPhone 4, the New York Times is now reporting, citing a person with direct knowledge of the phone’s design, that Jobs was unaware of the issue until the phone was released a few weeks ago.

Moreover, the Times report notes that the problem may, in fact, be fixable with a software update.

One person with direct knowledge of the phone’s design said Thursday that the iPhone 4 exposed a longstanding weakness in the basic communications software inside Apple’s phones and that the reception problems were not caused by an isolated hardware flaw.

Instead, the problems emerged in the complex interaction between specialized communications software and the antenna, said the person, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

The person said the problems were longstanding but had been exposed by the design of the iPhone 4… The glitch could presumably be fixed with a software update, and it appears to be unrelated to one that affected the display of the phone’s signal strength.