iPhone: "Just works" (70% of the time)

An Apple Genius Bar employee has told a New York City-area iPhone owner that iPhone users in the region experience an average of 30% dropped calls. So there you have it, the iPhone "just works" ... 70% of the time.

The story really does defy belief:

Giz reader Manoj took his iPhone to the Genius Bar to have it looked at because it was dropping calls left and right, and AT&T swore stuff was totally kosher on their end, so he thought something was wrong with his phone. After doing a stat dump, the Genius showed Manoj that his iPhone had actually dropped 22 percent of calls.

The jawdropper: The Genius told Manoj that's actually excellent compared to most people in the New York area, where a 30 percent dropped call rate is the average.

I'm not sure what's worse here, being told that a 22% dropped call rate is fine, or finding out that the average dropped call rate is 30%? Either way, the numbers paint a gloomy picture for Apple and AT&T, and a much gloomier picture for people paying large amounts of hard-earned cash for what amounts to an appalling level of service.

Is the dropped call rate in NYC really this bad for the iPhone and AT&T, or is this just Genius Bar nonsense talk?