In a call for more accountability from phone manufacturers and network operators, Slate's Farhad Manjoo focuses on a little-remarked aspect of Steve Jobs' mea minima culpa regarding the iPhone 4's antenna problems: Jobs' attempt to point the finger at other cell-phone makers by insisting that the iPhone's shortcomings were an industrywide problem.

Manjoo notes the quick retort from the co-CEOs of Research in Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry, iPhone's predecessor and rival, who blasted Jobs for what they said "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."  (You can read their statetment here.)  

But Manjoo rightly notes this is indeed a broader issue. It's an industrywide problem - just not the industrywide problem that Jobs claimed. Instead, it's a problem of companies' hiding the ball from the consumers they want to buy their products and services.

Manjoo pushed a couple phone-makers for actual data and got back more posturing - you can read about his efforts here. Then he wrote about his increasing frustration at the knowledge that the manufacturers and carriers know far more more than they disclose about their devices' and systems' shortcomings:

... the carriers constantly measure how well specific devices perform on their networks, and they send detailed dropped-call information to the manufacturers. But neither the phone makers nor the carriers want to make that data public—and they won't say why, either.

As I argued last year, this kind of secrecy is one of the main reasons wireless service in America lags the rest of the world. These days, it's possible to find accurate performance data for most of the major purchases we make in our lives. If you're shopping for a car, you can find out its gas mileage. If you're shopping for a plane ticket, you can look up each airline's on-time rate. When you go looking for a new cell phone, though, you enter a data-free zone in which every company is free to claim that its devices offer spectacular service. If customers or the media disagree, the companies can argue—as Apple did last week—that the critics are just carping, because nobody has any definitive data that can prove them wrong.

Should we believe RIM, Motorola, HTC, Nokia, and other phone manufacturers when they claim that their phones offer better reception than Apple's? Not blindly. After all, Apple was recently boasting that the "iPhone 4's wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped"—a claim that fell apart when Jobs, to his credit, brought out actual dropped call data at his press conference, data that showed the new iPhone drops more calls than last year's model, the 3GS. If we're now questioning Apple, we should also question everyone else. While I commend Apple's rivals for taking advantage of a good PR opportunity, I wouldn't put too much stock in their statements. If you want me to believe the BlackBerry Bold or the Droid X or the HTC EVO really drops fewer calls than the iPhone, prove it to me. Otherwise, just stop talking.

Manjoo isn't the first to push for more transparency. But his is a timely call for more information and less posturing.

Just the week, the Federal Communications Commission launched a new consumer portal - http://reboot.fcc.gov/consumers/ - that highlights many of its most useful consumer advisories and tools.

Among them is the FCC's self-test of your home broadband's upload and download speeds (click here to try it), which that the agency touts as a remedy for confusing ads claiming "blazing fast" internet speeds.

Could the FCC do the same for wireless networks?

Evaluating and comparing the service strengths of various wireless networks, even from a single, fixed location, would undoubtedly be harder, and might take a specialized tool.  But if one were available, consumers would celebrate - and be much better able to make informed choices.