The iPhone 4 antenna problem is real. Apple needs to step up and make things right for the customers affected by it, and that may be what the company plans to do during a last-minute press conference Friday.

The press conference will start 10 a.m. at Apple’s town hall in Cupertino, California, and Wired.com will provide news coverage of the event. You can also follow follow @gadgetlab or @bxchen on Twitter to stay plugged in to the news in real time.

Multiple independent tests have found that the iPhone 4 was more likely to suffer from attenuation (i.e., signal degradation) compared to similar handsets, when held in a very natural position covering the antenna gap in the lower-left corner.

The tests so far, performed by Consumer Reports and some bloggers, aren’t perfectly scientific, but they are consistent and repeatable. They point to the same inescapable conclusion: The iPhone 4’s antenna issues are related to a hardware design flaw.

That’s not a problem that can be resolved with an upcoming software update to correct the way the iPhone 4 displays signal strength, as Apple has promised.

On top of that, the reader reports about this issue continue to pour in to inboxes of several tech publications, including Wired, Gizmodo and Engadget.