Whatever you think of Steve Jobs' defense of the iPhone 4 and its reception issues, the Apple boss was right about one thing: Antennas are a technological challenge, one that engineers have wrestled with since before Gordon Gekko barked orders into his Motorola DynaTAC from a beach in the Hamptons. And as phones continue to shrink, fitting antennas in and making them work correctly often comes down to trial and error, says Stephen Temple, a retired engineer who helped plan Europe's GSM technology. "It would be fair to say that antenna design is a little bit of a dark art," Temple says.
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