As if Apple doesn’t have enough PR problems what with the alleged sensitivity issues surrounding the latest and greatest iPhone, now Consumer Reports, the most respected product review publication in the U.S., has, as a result of their own testing, given the hot new gadget a negative rating.

In the original blog on the subject, CR said they couldn’t figure out how to duplicate the alleged reception problem. But evidently they found the secret handshake, which was the reason for a thumbs down, at least until Apple comes up with a fix.

Their findings are best summarized in these sentences: “When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.”

In the meantime, CR is also suggesting that, other than holding it differently of course, you do something to cover up the sensitive region with tape or a case. Or buy someone else’s product, even though the iPhone 4 otherwise scored better than the smartphones they tested in a new product roundup.

Even though covering the sensitive region of the phone eliminates the problem, CR says it’s not enough: “…Apple needs to come up with a permanent—and free—fix for the antenna problem before we can recommend the iPhone 4.”

The dreaded “Not Recommended” label from CR can often be the kiss of death for a product, or severely hurt sales. In recent months, Toyota was sent rushing back to the drawing board when one of their luxury SUVs was given bad marks because of alleged serious handling problems. Toyota brought out a software fix that addressed the vehicle’s handling characteristics, and, upon confirming that the update did what it was supposed to do, CF withdrew the unfavorable rating.

I have had only brief face time with an iPhone 4, and haven’t made an extended effort to duplicate the reception problem. More to the point, CR’s efforts to see if other smartphones had similar reception defects may be flawed if we assume they tried the same hand position, not considering other positions would trigger their specific problems. Certainly the conclusion that none of the other devices they tested had the problem flies in the face of independent tests that present contrary results.

Unfortunately, CR hasn’t really treated Apple so fairly in most respects. Their PC reviews, for example, routinely fail to enumerate the differences between the Mac OS and Windows, so the reader is left with the impression that the Mac is just the higher-priced spread, even though the truth is far more nuanced.

So it may well be that CR’s target audience isn’t that heavy into Apple products anyway, even though they still generally get high ratings and score well in the magazine’s reliability surveys of its readership. But when you add the CR complaint to loads of press reports about problems with the new iPhone’s reception, it can be enough to impact sales severely once the rush of early adopters has abated.

This doesn’t mean Apple is confronting an insoluble problem. They could, perhaps, offer free “bumpers” for folks who complain about the ability to make and receive phone calls. That promised software update to revise the sensitivity display should be pushed out as quickly as possible, and perhaps, along the way, Apple might find a way to make the product function more reliably under conditions where signal strength is marginal.

Once that’s done, they ought to shout the fix to the skies and make sure that they can demonstrate to CR’s editors that they’ve solved the problem, regardless of the true cause.

The timing, however, couldn’t be worse. Up till now, Apple has been on a roll because of super successful product introductions, and I wonder once again why it took loads of complaints, the threat of class action lawsuits and heavy press coverage to discover that a problem really existed.

Worse, Apple’s usually flawless PR machine failed big time here. The original admonitions by corporate communications and even Steve Jobs to just hold the phone differently didn’t sit well. It makes you think that perhaps they had something to hide, or perhaps rushed the product to market without sufficient field testing under severe conditions.

Yes, I can see where maybe that infamous lost or stolen prototype might have hurt Apple’s testing process. It is possible, I suppose, that they opted to restrict the testing process to more controlled environments, and thus failed to discover the consequences of customers handling the phone with sweaty palms in a way that caused this defect to appear.

I don’t dispute the contention from antenna experts that all or most mobile handsets will display similar reception issues when held in the right or wrong way, depending on your point of view. Apple might do well to hold a public demonstration, with the press in attendance, to confirm that, say, a Droid or a Droid X can be induced to also lose sensitivity under easily duplicated conditions.

In the end, I still believe Apple will surmount these obstacles and emerge triumphant. But Steve Jobs has to know that they brought it all on themselves.

So I talked to a local hair stylist the other day, someone whom I regard as reasonably tech savvy, and he told me why he would never buy an iPhone 4. “Too many problems,” he said, although he wasn’t able to name anything specific.

He wasn’t alone in expressing that viewpoint. My wife said she’d heard the same thing a number of times on 24/7 cable TV, and wondered why I’d consider upgrading. “Isn’t your old iPhone working all right? Why cause trouble for yourself?”

Barbara is smart and practical. Even though she knows that I can sell off my current iPhone for essentially the same amount of money that I paid for it originally, she was thinking about my comfort and convenience.

Now I have never had serious trouble with an Apple product. The closest I came was the cursed PowerBook 5300ce that I bought in 1995. Apple was in the doldrums then, and they made some really foolish decisions that I won’t bother to list. The 5300 series was also late to market, because the original batteries began to smoke in lab tests, and I had to return mine several times for various and sundry repairs. But for small things, mostly cosmetic.

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The conventional wisdom has it that the iPod is yesterday’s news. Yes, Apple continues to hold a dominant share of the digital media player marketplace, with nobody, not even Microsoft, having a ghost of a chance to compete. But the overall sales have flattened and begun to decline slightly. Apple no longer makes quite as much total income from the product lineup that’s credited with making the company a credible player in the consumer electronics industry.

But as much as some might be ready to write the iPod’s epitaph as yesterday’s news, let me remind you that Apple has also sold another 50 million or so products that include an iPod, but it’s just one of many features. That, of course, is the iPhone.

Now some, even Apple, regard the iPhone and the iPod as two totally separate product lines with only a symbolic link. At the same time, the standard Home screen of an iPhone and an iPad contain one telltale app, called iPod.

Yes, maybe Apple has reduced the functionality of the traditional iPod to a single application on two hot-selling gadgets that have a lot more features, but that doesn’t make them any less an iPod.

After all, the iPod was never anything more than a tiny handheld computer that played digital media files. At first, they were limited to music, but expanded to include movies and home videos.

There’s even an iPod nowadays, the nano, which masquerades as a pocket camcorder, but then that’s one function that the iPhone also serves, and perhaps there will be a camera in a future iPod touch and iPad.

This all-in-one functionality has always played a strong role in Apple’s product lines. The very first Mac wasn’t just a personal computer, but a fully functioning display as well. It didn’t make a Mac — or today’s iMac or portable — any less in terms of either product category when considered separately. This is especially true for the iMac, which incorporates a gorgeous desktop display and the guts of a powerful personal computer that, in the high-end editions, comes awfully close in performance to the Mac Pro workstation.

Considering Apple is all about integration — hardware and software — it makes sense that the iPod would ultimately morph into a type of Tricorder, that legendary handheld computer that was featured in various forms in the Star Trek TV shows and movies.

It just so happens that the iPhone and iPad beat the Tricorder because the latter doesn’t, at least according to the Star Trek legend, play music, or maybe I’m missing something in one of those novels based on the series.

Now there are certainly valid reasons for Apple to separate music players from smartphones and tablets. But so long as they merge the functionality of a music player into full-featured alternatives, there’s no difference in a practical sense. When it comes to product focus, labeling and accounting, you still have an iPod, and millions of people continue to buy them because they don’t want or need the rest of the features.

Certainly when parents hand out gear to children, only the older ones would merit a smartphone. The younger members of the family might get a phone, but it would be a special type oriented towards their age category, with the iPod holding their music and video libraries.

Remember, too, that Apple remains one of the few consumer electronics companies to actually have a long-term vision. Sure the other players might tell you they do — and I’m sure some, such as Sony and Panasonic — do have large R&D labs with some pretty snazzy gear under development. But Apple seems to have done it better than most of the competition.

So it should come as no surprise the direction the iPod has taken, and why its descendants are delivered as smartphones and tablet PCs. This isn’t to say that the roadmaps are always perfectly formed years in advance.

Steve Jobs has admitted, and there’s no reason to disbelieve him, that the iPhone was spun off from early efforts to build an iPad, which didn’t arrive, as we all know, until three years later.

That’s also a natural part of the product development process. Sometimes things take longer to gel, and there may be forks in the road where other product possibilities become possible.

What’s more, I don’t see the cheapest iPods disappearing. There will be a need for a tiny $49 music player for many years. It will become more powerful, with enough storage capacity to contain most anyone’s music library. But it will still be an iPod.

I suppose the best way to examine Apple’s mobile initiative is to lump all of the products together, which includes the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and regard them as one category with three branches.

If a major change is to come, it will be when and if the iPad reaches critical mass and becomes a legitimate Mac replacement. That sales of the iPad and the Mac are essentially the same now isn’t the issue. It’s whether the iPad can continue to gain momentum, and I expect it will, although the critics are still not sure.

It seems as if Apple can’t escape bad news these days. Most recently, it was all about the alleged antenna shortcomings of the latest and greatest iPhone. If you held it the right way — or the wrong way depending on your half-empty/half-full point of view — sensitivity dropped seriously.

Apple’s claim, after a few non-start explanations, is that they were displaying too many bars all along, so a marginal connection would deliver nearly the same visible signal strength as a good signal. That assumes you actually live somewhere in AT&T’s reach where a good signal is to be had.

Before I get on with this discussion, you have to wonder about those AT&T ads a while back proclaiming more bars and fewer dropped calls, knowing that it wasn’t just the latter that was false, but that they conveyed the illusion of a stronger signal than your mobile handset really acquired. When Apple says they are switching to AT&T’s current sensitivity algorithm, that seems a tacit admission that AT&T was previously lying about the number of bars displayed, and Apple just followed the same routine in total ignorance of the consequences.

Or, as many believe, it’s all just a clumsy spin control effort resulting from Apple being caught utterly flat-footed over the iPhone grip controversy. Yes, we all make mistakes, but I find it difficult to believe that the brilliant engineers at Apple Inc. let three years go by before finally being forced to respond to this issue as the result of being inundated with highly-public complaints about the serious loss of sensitivity of the iPhone 4 if you hold it the “wrong way.”

But that wasn’t all. You have all heard about the ongoing FTC probes into some of Apple’s business practices, such as blocking Flash from the mobile platform and severely limiting the use of third-party development environments to build software for the App Store. And I haven’t even begun to address privacy issues growing out of iAds and other matters.

Even if Apple emerges with a clean skin — or only slightly dirty — from these investigations, it’s a curious turnaround to see a company once given up for lost suddenly being respected as a fearsome competitor in several tech markets. Curious indeed!

There’s also the news this week that a reported 400 iTunes accounts have been hacked, resulting in customers being charged loads of money for non-existent purchases. The revelation comes at the same time as one developer was summarily ejected from the iOS SDK program after attempting to game the system, though it’s unclear if the two events are somehow related.

Of course, with over 225,000 apps available, even though Apple must examine and approve every entry, they are still apt to make mistakes. At least they can unapprove an app, something very rarely done in the Android market, although I gather it is possible for Google to pull the plug for the worst offenders, but has it ever happened?

What about the potential for downloading a malware-ridden piece of junk on an Android phone? How are you protected, or is Google so involved in the job of attracting more eyeballs for targeted ads that they occasionally overlook such issues?

In any case, when it comes to credit cards, I’ll cut Apple some slack. There is really no way to guarantee 100% security. That’s why credit card companies will, or should, reverse or chargeback transactions that are reported as bogus. It happens to many of us; my son once found his debit card overdrawn as the result of a fake transaction, and his bank didn’t hesitate to fix the problem. But the right to dispute is mandated by law, so it shouldn’t be a large issue. Besides, with over 150 million accounts on file, you can well understand that Apple isn’t doing so bad, if the 400 figure is accurate.

If there’s a downside to all this news, it’s the fact that no company, even one as iconic as Apple, can endure endless bouts of bad publicity without consequence. Right or wrong, customers will take notice, and sales will be lost. This isn’t to say that the iPhone 4 will become a failure because of this antenna issue, however it is ultimately resolved. But it’s a highly competitive market out there, and, if you’re willing to put up with a less-finished OS, there is far more hardware variety to be found on an Android OS phone.

Sure, they won’t have a retina display, a video conferencing app to match the ease and reliability of FaceTime, or any of the other flourishes that are typical of an Apple mobile product. There’s no mystique and no prestige about a smartphone from HTC or Motorola. They might have some wonderful features, along with less elegant ones of course, so they are very much the equivalent of generic Windows PCs in the scheme of things.

But it’s not the Mac versus Windows platform wars all over again. The runaway success of the iPhone should, assuming no more serious missteps, keep Apple’s massive profit machine rolling for years to come.