Clarifying the much-talked-about antenna issue of the newly-released iPhone 4, the Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted during the company’s Friday press event that all the smartphones faced reception issues – a statement that he substantiated with a video demonstration of handsets from HTC, Samsung, RIM, and other manufacturers; and the comparison obviously not going down too well with these companies.

The handsets that Jobs demonstrated at the conference, to highlight the signal attenuation problems, included HTC’s Droid Eris; Samsung’s Omnia II; and RIM’s BlackBerry Bold 9700.

RIM has given pretty harsh official statements about Jobs’ so-called ‘Antennagate’ drama to apparently cover up its iPhone 4’s antenna problem. Terming the entire antenna sags as “Apple’s self-made debacle,” RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie said: “Apple's claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public's understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple's difficult situation.”

Meanwhile, though HTC has refrained from making any official statement to show its disapproval of the Apple demo, Eric Lin, head of Global PR for HTC online PR manager, revealed that the antenna issue affects hardly “0.016 percent” of its handsets.

In addition, companies like Nokia too have criticized the disparaging move by Apple, which has seemingly been ignoring the backlash that the iPhone 4 has widely faced for its antenna/reception issues.