A surprising 81% of voters in a recent poll expressed disaffection or disinterest towards Apple's iPhone. The poll, hosted on mobile phone comparison site best-mobile-contracts.co.uk, posed the question “Has the iPhone antenna issue deterred you from buying an iPhone?” The results showed that a great majority of voters were either deterred or had never liked the iPhone.

Apple, and the iPhone 4 in particular, have been on the receiving end of a flurry of recent negative publicity as a result of the iPhone 4's allegedly faulty antenna. What, then, is the effect of all this bad press?

According to the best-mobile-contracts.co.uk poll, 42% of people have never liked the iPhone and wouldn't ever consider buying one. While Apple's marketing people might be upset by this, it doesn't say much about effect of the iPhone 4's bad publicity. After all, if they were never going to buy an iPhone, what difference could the antenna issue make?

More worryingly for Apple, about 2 in 5 (39%) of people surveyed stated that the issues with the iPhone 4 had deterred them from buying an iPhone. That's a big chunk of Apple's potential market who've been completely put off buying any model of iPhone, either by the problems themselves or by the way that Apple have handled them.

Of the remaining 1 in 5 or so people who haven't been put off buying an iPhone, about a quarter still wouldn't buy an iPhone 4, preferring to stick to the older models. That, too, must be worrying for Apple, who've spent huge sums on developing and marketing their latest next-generation phone.

Apple famously sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 handsets in their first 3 days of sales, so there's really no risk of them making a loss on the project. Of course, those impressive sales figures came before all the problems with the latest model were discovered and widely publicised. The real test for Apple's iPhone brand might be where they go from here, with every flaw and fault known by customers. And if a quarter of people who still want an iPhone don't want an iPhone 4, how many won't want an iPhone 5?