While it may sound like a wrestling move, ‘death grip’ is the descriptive term that some people are using to describe how a simple hand grip can adversely affect antenna performance on Apple’s new iPhone 4. The official statement by Apple that this “is a fact of life for every wireless phone” has met with some controversy.
PCmag decided to test this statement by putting a few different phones through the ‘grip of death’, to very interesting results. The phones tested were a pretty good representation of what’s available in 2010; with the Apple iPhone 4, Motorola Droid X, Droid Incredible by HTC, T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide, Samsung Captivate, and BlackBerry Bold 9650.
While I will not bore you with the exact results, they basically showed that most phones were in some way affected when a ‘death grip’ way applied in a certain way. However, the iPhone 4 seemed to be the most adversely affected, with the signal strength bars decreasing markedly when the phone was gripped anywhere on the bottom half of the unit.
The T-Mobile myTouch came second in terms of adverse performance through the ‘grip of death’, followed by the HTC Droid, the Motorola Droid, the BlackBerry Bold, and the Samsung Captivate. What was notable from this test was how easily the iPhone could be put in a ‘death grip’, as opposed to many of the other models that didn’t have such a big un-sweet spot for gripping.
Some commentators are even referring to the ‘death grip’ as a ‘death touch’ in the iPhone 4, as it seems to be that susceptible to any kind of excessive pressure. While the jury is still out, this is probably due to the technology involved, with the iPhone 4 being the only phone in the test utilising an uninsulated external antenna. This makes it much easier to obstruct the carrier signal with the human body, which is not such an issue with the other phones that use an insulated internal antenna design.
While the test at PCmag is definitely not conclusive, and probably just a little bit silly, it does highlight a design flaw with the new iPhones. Many people think they have isolated this problem as being a short between the GSM and GPS/Bluetooth/WiFi antennas, both of which lie only millimetres apart. If this is correct and Apple do in fact have a hardware problem on their hands, a lot of consumers are going to be very unhappy indeed.
