When the new iPhone was announced, Apple CEO Steve Jobs crowed about a new antenna design that would improve wireless reception by making the metal band forming the outside edges of the phone part of the antenna. Wireless antennas are typically built on the inside of phones.To find out if this innovation really makes the iPhone 4 connect better and faster than previous models, I took the new phone and its predecessor, the iPhone 3GS, for a mini-tour around San Francisco, measuring and comparing the network connection speeds and voice-call quality of the two phones. I tested the phones at the same locations at the same times over the same AT&T network; the only difference was the 3G radios and the antennas in the devices.Though my tests were informal and my results were far from definitive, the results left me with the impression that the iPhone 4's antenna design has some very positive effects on the phone's network performance.