Video evidence of the iPhone 4 death grip -- this time with real numbers

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Death Grip poll vote here http://ideathgrip.com

I initially had the same signal issues that everyone has been talking about when holding the iPhone 4 in the left-hand position known as the death grip. However, I popped out the microSIM card, reseated it, and since then, haven't seen the issue...

Is it just me or Erica talks like a blase stewardess?

I hope they don't boot you for making this video!

I will throw another scenario into the mix just to confuse the matter. I was sitting in my office checking email with 4 bars. After a couple of minutes I looked and had no bars but was still connected so I continued and went to the app store and did some things there. After a couple more minutes I looked at the bars again and had 5 bars. Hadn't changed death grip hand position or moved from my chair. This happened once more in the same session. A kind of ebb and flow of the signal. One time in the same place, I picked up the phone and the grip of death gave me 3 more bars as I watched.
Makes me wonder if some people are getting excited by the signal loss and if they just ignored it they would see this ebb and flow over time. Not that people are not having problems but maybe there are several things happening that are all being classified as this particular problem.
Maybe the phone is more sensitive so we see changes in the network as they are happening so we actually see the roller coaster ride of the signal in some cases. Just wondering...

For the signal reception to degrade, when the antenna is touched, to the point where the connection fails is, I think, a common thing, especially given a weak signal to begin with. Note that, in the examples from the Edibleapple.com (http://www.edibleapple.com/signal-attenuation-is-not-unique-to-the-iphone-also-affects-nokia-and-htc-devices/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EdibleApple+%28Edible+Apple%29), the Droid Incredible and the Nokia E71 went to one or two bars, when a hand covered the area of the phone where the antenna is located. Most, in fact, all, of these anecdotal tests fail to do at least two important things, which this test also failed to do. First, they don't simultaneously test with the iPhone 4 other recent smartphones from the same location on AT&T's network by covering the area of those phone where the phone's antenna is located, which is almost always at the bottom of the phone. And, second, they don't test for the important thing, which is at what signal strength, for each of phones that are simultaneously tested, the connection fails.

And of course, the other concern with the test, infra, is whether it was done correctly. That its testing protocol doesn't even correctly test the correct hypothesis to determine whether the iPhone 4 has a hardware defect leaves me with no faith in its conclusions.

In other words, holding the iPhone 4 so that its reception of signal declines even to zero doesn't prove that there is a hardware defect in the iPhone 4's antenna, if other phones would also under the same circumstances lose reception to the point that their respective connections to the tower fails. And, of course, when doing the test in any location, one would have to carefully control for how any given number of phones being tested on the particular tower(s) affected the availability and strength of the signal for the cell tower or towers in the area. Also, testing would have to be done with sufficient sample sizes of phones and number of test to produce statistically valid results.

Given the complexity of this phenomena and the large number of variables that must be controlled, which most non-experts don't have the facilities to control, I am not much impressive with this and other anecdotal tests as proof that the iPhone 4 has a hardware defect. Hell, I am about as far from physicist as you can get, and I can see that the test, infra, does nothing more than demonstrate that the iPhone 4 experiences attenuation of reception when its antenna is touched, but that is not at issue and is true for all cell phones. What is at issue is whether the iPhone 4's antenna makes its common problem of attenuated reception, when in close proximity to human skin, worst than its predecessors and its peers. This test does not do that, and I think it unlikely that any amateur is likely to design and conduct any experiment that will do that.

However, these kinds of "experiments," such as the one, infra, are doing damage to Apple's reputation, because they are persuasive, even though they may be completely wrong in their conclusions. I still think that Anandtech, cited here and which concludes that the iPhone 4's has the best reception of any iPhone, Consumer Reports, and Spencer Webb (http://www.pcworld.com/article/200453/antenna_expert_apple_is_right_iphone_4_signal_woes_overblown.html) are more likely to be right.

The dBm meter in this app is bogus. Why did you arbitrarily set the top of the scale to -80 db? My signal strength regularly goes well above that. It's just like those bogus benchmark sites that have a graph comparing hardware in some metric, but don't start the graph at zero, which makes it very difficult to get any sense of scale. If the graph appears to show a range of possibilities, but really only shows a fraction of that range, then it is rigged for emotional effect. Period.

Make a new one, and have it cover the FULL range of possible signal strengths from -51 dBm to -113 dBm, and maybe I'll pay some attention. Until then, I'm not interested.

Nice try, but it falls short.

You need to compare meaningful quantities. Not bars. Not smiley faces. dBm is good because it measures signal strength in a standardized way, but it's only part of the equation. The AnandTech article is spot on with talk of Signal to Noise Ratio. Also, I have no way of knowing how accurate your dBm meter is. It's cartoonish appearance does not signal credibility.

Any rf engineer knows all phones are affected by interfering with their antennas, and it appears that tech bloggers are just starting to learn this lesson. The question is not whether it can be demonstrated that iPhone 4 is affected, but to what degree it is affected and whether it's affected more than other phones.

Has anyone read this article?

http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/7/2/first-impressions-iphone-4.html