Consumer Reports has finished testing the iPhone 4 and has decided that they cannot recommend it because of it’s reception problems.

They tested three iPhone 4s and several other AT&T phones in a radio frequency isolation chamber with a base-station emulator. None of the other phones tested experienced the same signal-loss problems that the iPhone 4 did.

Interestingly Consumer Reports rates the iPhone 4 at the top of the heap among other recently released high-end handsets but cannot recommend the device because of signal issues — signal issues that many iPhone 4 users will never notice with regular use.

If iPhone 4’s signal issues were substantial enough to force Consumer Reports to be unable to recommend the device, why wasn’t it a big enough deal to knock it off the top of the heap in their rankings?