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Death Grip Tested On iPhone Competitors
adeelarshad82 writes "Given Steve Jobs' recent claims about 'Death Grip' being a common problem among smart phones, PCMag tested out six major iPhone competitors to see how they would react to the grip. The test included Motorola Droid X, T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide, Droid Incredible by HTC, BlackBerry Bold 9650, and the Samsung Captivate. The signal strength was measured in dBm, which typically ranges between -50 to -110 dBm (numbers closer to zero show better signal). Interestingly, the test results video showed mixed results. T-Mobile myTouch 3G and Samsung Captivate showed drastic changes, dropping down to -89 and -97 dBm respectively. On the other hand, while the signal strength dropped for HTC Droid Incredible, Motorola Droid X and Blackberry Bold, it wasn't as severe. Results of testing showed that not all phones reacted the same way to the typical death grip and required variations of it to bring about results."
"On the other hand, while the signal strength dropped for HTC Droid Incredible, Motorola Droid X and Blackberry Bold, it wasn't as severe. "
Please forgive me if It was a typo and I seem like I'm being a smart-ass.
it's under construction
Why is the standard response for anything anyone is caught doing is to reply that someone else is doing (insert catch word lie: more|also|worse|longer) than we have.
apple-haters will be sad, but they can take comfort in the fact that he is probably still a douche
-I'm just sayin'
I think that the Banana significantly outperformed the iPhone.
No, really, I mean it.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
How many of them have bare metal antennas on the surface of the phone? No matter what weasel words Steve chooses, there is no excuse for this defect.
So what if other phones require a "death grip" to affect signal strength? After all, all phones are subject to the laws of physics; if you block the signal, there is nothing the phone can do about it.
Is that what you call it when your iPhone is stuck in your boyfriend's rectum, and not matter how hard you try to fish it out with your cock it just won't budge?
The guys at the glory-hole all say the "Death Grip" problem is overblown and can be fixed with just a rubber band and a little lube.
How many more stories about this crap? The holy iPhone has a small defect. Guess what, it is not the biggest problem that the "form over function" philosophy has brought to the device. Those who value form will always buy the stupid device, its ability to complete calls (if you don't hold it the wrong way) is just an extra.
As for the "death grip". We were not talking about any death grips, that was never the issue and people don't usually hold their phone like that. The problem was with simply touching the device at the bottom corner and only the iPhone 4 has a problem (for "why" and "does it matter" see first paragraph of post).
And can we get on now? This is getting more annoying than dupes.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Steve Jobs hasn't ever admitted to the iPhone 4 losing all signal or dropping calls when held in the "death grip". He only admitted to a loss of signal strength, which he said all phones experience when held in a similar manner. This article just seems to confirm what he said. The real world difference is, that the iPhone 4 can actually drop calls and appear to lose all signal when held this way. Notice there is a difference between reality and what Apple (or any company that doesn't want to admit they have a flaw in their product) will admit to.
"[HTC Incredible] By using a death grip of both hands covering the phone we saw the results go from -57 to -64 dBm"
"[Droid X] can be difficult[...] We used two hands on this larger phone."
"[BlackBerry Bold] was a little more resistant [...] hold of it with two hands, we saw the signal strength go from -80 to -87 dBm."
Yeah, cause covering the entire phone with two hands is a perfectly normal way that people would ever use the phone. I bet if I shoved a smart phone up my a**, it would lose a lot of signal too...
One of the things I've wondered about is that Apple said the iPhone 4 does drop more calls than the 3GS. However, the iPhone 4 gets reception in locations the 3GS doesn't, so if iPhone 4 is dropping calls in situations where the 3GS wouldn't even have bars in the first place, it makes it look worse than it is.
Of course it can be degraded depending on its environment.
What is next, the 'discovery' that batteries run down differently depending on the temperature?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They're seriously comparing phones that lose signal with a standard grip to phones where hold the phone with both hands deliberately trying to cover the antenna and pretend the result is somehow meaningful?
Wouldn't a sane signal comparison compare them using reasonably common grips? It's sorta stupid to say "When you deliberately cover both antennas with an awkward two hand grip it'll lose 10 dBm", everyone knows the antenna will lose signal if you cover it, the point is that the iPhone is so easy to cover by accident.
Attenuation happens. Film at 11...
This is all very interesting, but any tech site that hasn't been using this method in their smartphone reviews since this started is behind the 8 ball. Consider Anantech's coverage of last week's update, with numbers before and after the software update and comparisons to the field. Heck, their Droid X review today treats the test as a standard benchmark.
So I hope all of these manufacturers do the right thing and recall their phones. If it possible to do something to a phone to get it drop in signal, then the only right answer is a recall. Originally I thought that the only right answer was a free case for everyone that bought them, but then Apple gave out free cases and I had to revise my opinion. I haven't yet figured out how to make the signal drops on phones from other manufacturers somehow Apple's fault, but if I can, then I will again revise my opinion to demand that Apple recalls the phones on behalf os the other manufacturers as well. There has to be a class action lawsuit somewhere here that I can peg on Apple...
The crushing the phone with two hands seems significantly different from touch the bottom left corner.
That's not surprising with any antennae. It'd be more convincing if the others had that drop when holding it normally to talk.
I'm just not seeing a drop from the table to just in my hand with my old phone, and well, I don't need to juice my phone to talk - I do usually touch it though.
Of course Jobs cherry-picked the phones that would most-illustrate a similar effect. I have an iPhone 4 and I love it -- never had any signal issues (but I use a Belkin Vue Grip case). I was a bit annoyed at the photos Apple showed, though -- if you look at the pictures, you can clearly see that they're squeezing the *SHIT* out of the phone to get the analogous effect (seriously, look at the guy's thumb who's squeezing the Blackberry -- he's pressing so hard, most of his thumb is WHITE). I'm a huge Apple fan, but I really don't appreciate attempts at manipulating results like that. NO ONE is going to squeeze their phone that hard. If they do, they deserve the signal loss. Oh, and that September 30th date? I bet they're actively working on an antenna redesign and that's when they'll be rolling it out in new iPhones delivered starting on that date -- it will be very interesting to dissect an iPhone made in October to see if this theory hold water.
Can I stop explaining to people why I intend to purchase this phone despite a minor defect that won't affect me now?
I think the Death Grip is referring to the relationship between Steve and the Fan-boys..
Perhaps only old fogeys recall rabbit ear TV antennas for analogue TVs ... touching can improve or degrade signal. Depends on where, what frequencies, etc.
No matter how clever the engineering, there's no cheating the law of physics.
I always use a bluetooth headset and seldom hold the phone during calls; and use a case. So it all seemed like a tempest in a teacup to me.
Really, that is not what the iphone users were complaining about. Yes you can cause cell phone signal strength to fall by covering it with both hands. I know the video was a parody, or meant as humor, but people will think that all cell phones are equal. They are not. And much depends on your provider and location also. It's easier to degrade a weak signal than a strong signal. So anyone saying Jobs was right by saying all phones have that problem is wrong. I have an HTC Incredible. I do not experience what iphone users are complaining about. The recent iphone release was just a bad design esp. for weak signal areas. People just need to move on. If the phone doesn't work for you, send it back.
I had no idea you could play World of Warcraft on a smartphone.
"I know together we'll make the possible totally impossible" - Homme
When you have to go to such inane and absurd attempts at doing damage control for a fundamentally defective design you might has well just give up trying to defend the piece of junk iPhone.
No wonder Android is destroying the iPhone in sales. 160,000 new phones a day/ 50 million or so a year. And that is just the rate as of a few months ago. Android has been doubling its marketshare every quarter since last year.
People adapt to their phones to optimize their signal. Just as you stand where the signal's strongest, you adjust your grip so the signal is strongest. It's just not that big a deal when you actually use the phone.
I can now make and receive calls from locations that I couldn't before I got the phone and the call is cleaner. In exchange, I had to learn to hold my phone slightly differently than I used to. I can live with that. If you can't, don't get an iPhone.
You may have joined the dark side and control an entire evil empire, Mr. Jobs, but you are not a Sith Lord ... yet.
The issue with iPhone 4 isn't about *gripping it*, it's about simply touching this spot to affect the signal.
... *instant* loss of sound quality to the point I couldn't understand anything for several seconds.
Just yesterday I was on the phone and my pinky accidentally touched that spot
I will show you a death grip that nothing can survive.
All blenders I know of have caps which should be in place before you turn them on. I have even seen one that has a safety switch making it impossible to be turned on without the cap.
What happened to cellphones with protruding antenna? Other than having it jab me in the crotch when I put the phone in my pocket I never had an issue with such a phone.
http://mobihealthnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/0660208.gif
And as my failing memory serves, the signal was consistently better.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
If only I could find a cable long enough. Watch this part:
NO SIGNAL LOSS - beat that!
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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Bananas aren't Fruit, they're Herbs
You never catch me alive
Take it for what it's worth Apple has a page on Smartphone Antenna Performance where they document various popular phones and signal attenuation problems.
Is it propaganda... ahm I meant good public relations, probably to some extent.
Are the comparisons true, likely to some extent.
Do we care, not really. This whole thing is way out of proportion and only really matters to people who've got nothing better to do.
If you wrap your hands tightly around most of a phone, yes, you can produce a signal loss. You can also produce a signal loss by moving into a node or creating a standing wave pattern.
But the iPhone 4 doesn't require a "death grip", a touch of the gap separating the two antennas on the case suffices. No other phone behaves like that.
The iPhone 4 antenna design flaw results in a death *touch* which is activated simply by touching a specific place on the case. This is a far worse problem than using a specific grip to block antenna signals all around with a grip of your hand. Apple is basically trying to change the conversation to be about gripping phones in specific ways blocking some radio signals (which is an issue with every cell phone ever) and away from the design flaw which results in the iPhone 4's unique "death touch" problem.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Besides a) attenuation due to hand holding and b) change of the antenna characteristics due to bridging there's a third problem which really exacerbates the first two: the antenna of the iPhone 4G is highly directional. In other words, it matters a LOT which way you point the phone. Sometimes even small changes around it can make a big difference in terms of whether you get data or not.
You can test this out (assuming you've got access to an iPhone 4G) by running a speed test application (there are plenty in the App Store) while holding / pointing the phone in different ways. I can trigger signal loss even without holding the phone. No bumper whatsoever is going to fix that problem and this is plain and simple bad antenna design. I lose a lot more data when streaming radio on the 4G than what the 3G did even though the bandwidth is (potentially) much higher.
People, people, people. Its not about the death grip. Its not about general signal loss on all phones.
It is about the magnitude of signal loss. According to Anand's article, the iPhone 4 loses 20 dBm from holding it naturally with the antenna gap covered. That is 30% of the signal range. No other phone can acheive this signal loss, even with the death grip. Most phones 10 dBm or less, or better, even with a death grip. The magnitude of the iPhone 4's signal loss is 100% higher, or more, than all of its competitors when held naturally. This is abysmal, and makes it very hard for the user to predict whether his call is in danger or not. The bar change helps this a bit, but it doesn't take away the fact that a vanilla iPhone 4 has a signal handicap on all of its competitors due to shitty engineering.
Total received signal power is only part of the story with HSPA. The measurements should also take the QUALITY of the signal into account, ie the Ec/N0 figure. It's possible to have a strong signal and shitty bit error rate and vice versa. But you majority hardware n00bs here on /. wouldn't have a facking clue about that. It's all about bars, isn't it?
The HTC Droid Incredible (Verizon), Motorola Droid X (Verizon) and Blackberry Bold (Sprint), are on CDMA networks... The myTouch 3G (T-Mobile), Samsung Captivate (AT&T), iPhone (AT&T) are on UMTS/GSM networks... So this comparison is testing phones on different networks, using different technologies, with likely different radio chips...
How many of them have bare metal antennas on the surface of the phone?
I think we can forgive the other phones for lacking in this design area, as it has been fashionable of late to embed antennas.
The thing is, the larger surface area of the external metal antenna does mean the iPhone gets really much better reception - both voice and data.
This comes with the tradeoff that there is one specific location that, if you touch, can cause SOME interference (though if it really affects you depends on signal strength).
In real life, this one weak location is not really an issue compared to the benefits you derive from a better antenna. I can make calls reliably from my house now where with the 3Gs, the calls would often drop out or sound terrible.
Shouldn't we all be concerned with the antenna making a better phone or not? Because for many, many people (as witnessed by the return rate) - the iPhone does a better job of that. If the antenna produces better calls then it's not a flaw, it's just the tradeoffs leading to a better antenna are different than tradeoffs made before - but it's still progress.
For all the whining about this look for competitors to start introducing external antenna soon.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think I am now just as tired of hearing about the iPhone 4 antenna issues as I am hearing about SCO.
Let me summarize so we can PLEASE move on:
iPhone has an antenna problem.
Get a bumper case or a friggin piece of scotch tape or take it back if you're not happy with it. If you don't own one and are just bitching because the rest of the world is, please get a life or at least find something else to gripe about.
Kk thx.
Nobody has ever questioned that physical objects can block, attenuate, or otherwise distort electromagnetic radiation. That is a pretty basic fact that nobody will deny.
So, a good phone is not one that overcomes the laws of physics preventing physical objects from interfering with its signal. No. A good phone is one that is designed in a way that allows you to grab the phone in any of the usual ways that are suitable to hold a conversation or browse the web and still get a signal. They usually achieve this through properly insulated, numerous, cleverly positioned antennas. A good phone is one that grabbed in any normal way suitable for browsing/texting/talking doesn't loose too much signal. Most cellpones pass this test ok. Check the video. The ONLY phone that lost signal while being grabbed normally was the iphone 4. All the others had to be covered almost all round the phone, with a firm, very hard grip, both hands, to make them loose some signal, and even then, they performed better than the iphone4.
This is not Apple hating. It's just reality. All iphones have crappy signal. Apple designed the phone to look nice, and forgot about functionality. The iphone 4 is even worse, but all previous generations have on average worse reception thanother phones.
On the other hand, I don't like smartphones. I carry a small, shitty, Nokia 1208 cellphone. It's light, small, tough, and has a huge battery life. The battery is very easily replaced, and I carry with me a spare fully loaded battery. Many people that I work with have iphones. Most of the time, when I go down to just 1-2 bars, iphones are already completely out of signal. Example, at the elevator, every iphone user drops the call immediately, but I still keep enough signal to continue talking. That's what a cellphone is supposed to be. I don't feel the urge to carry with me a camera, a digital recorder, an audio/video player, a web browser, etc. with me at all times, but if I did, I would carry a separate device that would do all of those things, while still carrying my small, simple phone that always works.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
All this time, I thought that little line was a capacitative, physical End Call button!
It is possible that clear nail polish will do very little to mitigate the problem.
Anadtech showed that 1-mil Kaplan tape applied did reduce the effect somewhat.
The case will always be better but even bare as it is it works well enough. I don't plan to put a case on mine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Consider an old radio. Tune to your favorite station. Then turn the tuning knob to the left or right. You'll find that your favorite station is gone, and you're now listening to something in Spanish!/i
Consider the iPhone 4 though. In real life if you have a strong signal, there's pretty much no effect from the "detuning". Even if you have a weak signal it may not be enough of a drop to drop a call...
So it doesn't really seem like a full detuning is what is going on, generally speaking (though that's part of it).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nokia managed to convince the industry internal antennas works just as well.
About time we brought the antenna back out and the signal reception back up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Has anyone else noticed the people frothing at the mouth in comments on Apple stories are almost all high user IDs?
I'm just saying...
No other phone can acheive this signal loss (20db)
From the video link:
Last up came the newly released Samsung Captivate. The Captivate went from -81 to-97 dBm after we applied the standard left-handed grip
Pretty close to 20.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ranking has gone up in the past 24 hours 469 days in the top 100.
http://astore.amazon.com/canon.eos.rebel.t1i.15.1.mp.on.sale-20
Folks... dBm is a ratio, expressed in dB, compared to 1 milliwatt, so dBm is refers to an absolute power level. When signals differ, that ratio is expressed in dB, not dBm.
Here's an analogy. Let's say a dog weighs 100 rats = 20dBrats. An elephant weighs 10000 rats = 40dBrats. So clearly an elephant weights 100 times a dog, ie. 20dB more than a dog. Rats, or any other reference weight, factors out of the comparison.
As with all dBs, this is logarithmic. A 20dBm loss is a 100x loss, 10dBm is a 10x loss. Each 10dB of attenuation is much worse than the last.
As an example if I gave you earplugs with 10dB of attenuation, it would take a conversational voice down to a quiet level. 20dB would take it down to a whisper. 30dB would put it below the background level of most rooms.
With dBs, you are talking orders of magnitude.
I realize that practical engineering should have nothing to do with this argument, but I'll try it anyway. I don't own a cellphone, but if I did, I'd prefer to have one with a spring-loaded telescoping antenna that pops or flips (like a switchblade) up (or down) when I want to talk. Then, unless I touch the antenna, it'd have a nice freespace location to radiate and receive in. Then, when I was done, I push on the top of the antenna and it would collapse into the body. In the case of the switchblade, I could also use it for personal protection or to scale fish.
ALL THIS JAZZ YOU'RE ARGUING IS UNNECESSARY. It's about fashion, NOT good engineering. The physics is elementary. The debate is childish. Thank you for your time, I return control of your screen now.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Apple has done a slight of hand here. Do not get sucked in.
iPhone4 issue comes from *** ONE FINGER TOUCHING THE PHONE ***, not "an entire hand cupped around the phone".
It's a bit like saying "yes, our -cars- aren't as crash proof as they could be, but look at Suzuki -motorbikes-, they're not safe either".
Also, it's a PATHETIC attempt by Apple to blame everyone else. This is disgraceful behaviour from Apple and it makes me sick. As a parent, I would not accept my child behaving this way (and he's 5). So why would I accept it from a grown man (SJ) and a "supposed" professional company?
AC
... but the car in front of me was also speeding. Also, didn't you notice that the car I passed back there had a broken tail light.
Hold it any way you want.
What's even more confusing is that they are problably not even on the same carrier, which effectively means that signal coverage on the same place (of test) is different for every phone.
What? A magazine I often turn to for my PC info actually had to test this "theory" out. Did they run out of things to test that weren't common sense? I guess I'm the only one thinking that covering an antenna with another "antenna" is a dumb ass thing to do. The human body being a conductor is not news. Cell phone antennas, internal or external, being affected by the human body is not news. Slashdot has been getting really laxed on what it considers news.
I wish I could [Death Grip] my phone from across the room when it rings and I'm busy pvping.
I am waiting for a joker Apple fanboy to say
"My iPhone lets me know low signal areas at the touch of a hand. Other phones don't do this. How did people live before this?"
But almost nobody actually has the problem. Only 0.55% of users report any problem.
They've successfully converted this from, "Is there an issue with touching a part of the iPhone that we should have caught during development," to "Is the iPhone better or worse than other smart phones when held in a death grip?"
When Steve Jobs gets to define the question, the answer will never be seriously negative for Apple.