Date set for Aussie iPhone 4 release

Steve Jobs announced in a press conference overnight that Australia will get the iPhone 4 on 30 July.

Steve Jobs announced 17 additional countries that would get the iPhone 4 on 30 July.
(Credit: Apple)

Jobs announced that the iPhone 4 would go on sale in 17 countries including Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore.

Apple also announced in the press conference that the white iPhone 4 would be released in the US on the same day.

The press conference was designed to address the iPhone 4's signal issues, dubbed "antennagate". Jobs announced a free rubber bumper for the phone to reduce the problems.

Jobs opened the press conference with "We're not perfect. We know that, you know that and phones aren't perfect either, but we want to make all of our users happy. If you don't know that about Apple, you don't know Apple."

"When we fall short, we try harder ... if a user is having a problem, it's our problem," said Jobs.

Apple undertook its own testing to get to the bottom of "antennagate" and performed tests on RIM's Blackberry Bold 9700, the HTC Droid Eris and the Samsung Omnia 2.

Each phone lost signal in the same way the iPhone 4 did when the users had adopted a particular way of holding the phone.

Jobs used the test to defend the iPhone 4's antenna, explicitly pointing out that "most smartphones behave exactly the same way".

Apple also acknowledged that the algorithm it used to calculate bars of signal was incorrect. "The drop looked far more catastrophic than it actually was," Jobs said.

Apple has sold 3 million iPhone 4 phones since its release three weeks ago, according to results from Jobs.

(Front page image credit: Steve Jobs Keynote image by acaben, CC BY-SA 2.0.)