Today at 1PM EST Steve Jobs tried to explain away their “Antennagate” issue that Apple is having with the iPhone 4. In case you have not been living underneath a rock the iPhone 4 has really been slammed from all angles for its shoddy placement of its antenna [video]. If you put a finger on the bottom left side then your signal will go from full to nada in seconds.
Jobs tried to explain this away by saying that all phones suffer from this death grip dead zone. They even created a whole new dedicated page on the Apple website at www.apple.com/antenna to “educate” customers about it. His first example is the BlackBerry Bold 9700 which has its antenna on the back all the way on the bottom.
I have to say that I have noticed a bar or two drop when I hold my 9700 totally cupped in both hands so I agree that most phones have an antenna somewhere that you can block. The issue here seems to be that the iPhone has its antenna near where your hand naturally goes and it is sensitive to any part of your body touching it there. I have never really noticed any signal degradation when I use my 9700 and I cup it in my hands all day… Also using a case does nothing to improve my 9700s reception on AT&T like the proposed bumper solution does for the iPhone 4. Even more so I have yet to see a video of somebody touching a 9700 with one finger to bring the reception from full to none like they have on the iPhone 4. Personally I think Apple did the right thing by waving restocking fees and offering free bumpers.
So I wanted to put this out there. What do you think about Steve Jobs and his claim that the iPhone 4 antenna issue is also an issue on the BlackBerry Bold 9700?
nanu ( View Profile) - Posts: