Apple probably won’t be pleased that Consumer Reports is once again recommending that users avoid buying a shiny new iPhone 4, this time upon Verizon’s network.
As they explain in video below, the Verizon iPhone apparently suffers from the same death grip that AT&T’s suffered from (which isn’t surprising as the only major difference between the two is the radio chip inside).
We made voice calls from each phone to a corded phone in the test chamber, in a series of declining signal strengths. At each level, if the call went through, we made contact with the phone with our hands and noted any changes in performance. With all phones except the iPhone, we gripped the phone’s sides to further verify that contact would not result in a dropped call. In all such cases, no calls were dropped.
With the iPhone 4, we placed a finger in contact with the lower-left-side gap. Reception typically dropped notably within 15 seconds or so of the gap being bridged. The iPhone eventually dropped calls when touched at very low signal strength—that is, at levels of around one bar in the phone’s signal-strength meter. (Consumer Reports)
Consumer Reports compared the iPhone 4 against 5 of it’s rivals including the Droid Incredible (by HTC) as well as the Droid X and Droid 2 by Motorola with the conclusion that iPhone 4 was still an inadequate device as a phone.
Although this probably won’t slow down the demand for iPhone 4’s in the future, their report will no doubt be touted by their rivals who can claim Apple’s mobile device was poorly designed.
With iPad 2.0 around the corner most of the public will probably ignore this report, although hopefully Apple will find a way to remedy the death grip issue in order to avoid embarrassment like this in the future.
(hat tip: Mobile Crunch)
Originally posted on February 25, 2011 @ 5:21 pm