Death Grip Does Not Affect Verizon iPhone 4?

It looks like Apple has solved the 'Death Grip' issues with the iPhone 4 that led to Antennagate, according to multiple reports.

ArsTechnica tied to replicate the issue both off and on a call.

Ars contributor Chris Foresman reported that bridging the remaining gap on the Verizon iPhone (using the "death grip," he says) did not result in any kind of CDMA signal attenuation. He also placed a call while death gripping and said that there was no noticeable signal loss.


PCMag was only able to get the Verizon to drop one bar when covering all four antenna marks.

Sitting at the demo bar, I managed to knock one bar off of the phone's signal indicator by tightly gripping the phone with both hands, covering all four antenna marks. Just covering the bottom of the phone didn't do it. But the demo room has excellent signal, and attenuation problems really show themselves in fringe signal areas. It'll take a real lab test to see how much Apple has improved the antenna here.

This is good news for those who really experienced the issue with their iPhone 4.

Update:
AnandTech reports that they are still seeing a drop in signal but suggest that new second receive antenna may mitigate hand holding problems that drop calls in low signal scenarios.


As you can see from the pictures below, the good ol' death grip still attenuates signal strength on Verizon. Held normally I was getting a reading of -65 dBm on the Verizon iPhone, but in full on death grip the signal strength dropped to -83 dBm. That's in line with what we've seen on AT&T. You will notice that there are more external antenna segments on the Verizon iPhone compared to the AT&T model. Specifically, there's a new strip at the very top of the phone that previously was a part of the UMTS/GSM antenna. With the Verizon iPhone 4 that strip is actually for a secondary receive antenna. This dual-receive antenna architecture is something that Verizon refers to as antenna diversity and it's a part of Verizon's spec for devices on its network. This is not something that's present on the GSM version of the iPhone 4. It's too early to tell if receive antenna diversity will mitigate the hand holding problems that drop calls in low signal scenarios. We will have to do extensive testing before we can figure that part out.