The Wrath of Jobs' latest victim: Motorola

Motorola is the latest smartphone manufacturer to endure the Wrath of Jobs.

That'd be Steve Jobs, of course, the armchair physicist who wants you to believe that the iPhone 4's external, touchable, and shortable antenna has reception problems equivalent to those experienced by phones that shield their antennas inside protective cases.

During Jobs' "There is no Antennagate" press conference on July 16, Jobs hosted three videos calling out the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700, HTC Droid Eris, and Samsung Omnia II as suffering from the same signal-attenuation problems that have been demonstrated to occur in the iPhone 4.

Unsurprisingly, those three companies called foul, claiming that Jobs was distorting both tech truth and what might be kindly called "marketing boundries".

In addition to the three accuséd companies, however, both unaccuséd Nokia and Motorola raised their voices in support. Both, we hasten to add, had also capitalized on Antennagate in public pronouncements: Nokia with a tongue-in-cheek "How do you hold your Nokia?" mockery of Apple's troubles, and Motorola with an "in your face, Steverino" full-page ad in The New York Times.

Apple reacted quickly. This Wednesday, Apple added the Nokia N97 mini to the aforementioned three phones it claims suffer signal attenuation when being hugged, as demonstrated by videos on the "Smartphone antenna performance" page on its website.

When Nokia joined the original three in Apple's Dropped Bar Hall of Shame™, The Reg wondered why an attack on Motorola was absent. Was Apple having trouble getting their hands on a Motorola Droid X, seeing as how there have been reports that it was in short supply, or were Apple's marketing folks not satisfied with the Droid X's signal-attenuation "performance"?

How naïve we were. On Saturday, Apple added a video of the Driod X to the DBHoS™.

Is it just your humble Reg reporter, or are any of you, dear readers, beginning to find Antennagate a wee bit petty? ®