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Proximity Sensor Presents Latest iPhone 4 Issue
tekgoblin sends news of the latest iPhone 4 glitch being reported in user forums and elsewhere: the phone's proximity sensor seems not to be detecting nearby faces, as it is designed to do, in order to deactivate the screen during a call. The result is often unintended input. "On the iPhone 3GS, the proximity sensor was located to the left of the earpiece speaker. But that space on iPhone 4 is now occupied by the front-facing camera, and the proximity sensor is above the earpiece. What's not clear is whether the iPhone 4 screen's misbehavior is due to the new location of the sensor, or it's because Apple tweaked the sensor's responses in [some] way."
Unfortunately many 3G and 3GS phones have trouble upgrading to iOS 4. They upgrade just fine, but then can no longer connect to the cellular data network and lose visual voicemail and MMS (phone calls and text still work). I'm surprised this story has slipped under the radar so far, since it's impacted a lot more people than the iPhone 4. There's still no official fix other than resetting your phone to factory and not applying previous backups to it ever again, but there are several community fixes of greater or lesser value (some only fix cellular data while leaving MMS and VVM broken, but the correct fix is to delete a specific file from your backup that contains the corrupted APN, reset to factory, and then reapply your modified backup and ignore the error when iTunes complains about not completing the backup).
Apple really seems to have fucked up this time around.