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Death grip on the iPhone 4... What about 3G/3GS?

H

Hdunlopclark

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 15, 2007
48
0
U.K.
Hello everyone :)

Just wanted to ask, am I the only one with a 3G thats signal will drop pretty dramatically when I do the 'death grip'? I did it last night and I went down from 5 bars to 2/3 (it was jumping up and down between them)

Makes me believe that this formula thing that apple is on about is true.

Anyone else?
 
I noticed my signal strength indicator has been lower then it used to be (don't remember if it was before or after iOS4 upgrade because I did the upgrade early). Just tried a "death grip" on my 3G and got the bars from 5 to 2. Waiting on my iPhone4 to be delivered still. If it too goes from 5 to 2 when I bridge the gap then that is pretty interesting.
 
Hdunlopclark said:
Hello everyone :)

Just wanted to ask, am I the only one with a 3G thats signal will drop pretty dramatically when I do the 'death grip'? I did it last night and I went down from 5 bars to 2/3 (it was jumping up and down between them)

Makes me believe that this formula thing that apple is on about is true.

Anyone else?
Click to expand...

There are three issues:

1. The iPhone 4 has an antenna problem. You can easily short across a gap in the metal band which instantly detunes the antenna to the point of being worthless. If you're on a call and you bridge that gap with anything conductive, the call is lost almost immediately. You don't even need to touch the phone, you can lay it on a table and bridge the gap with a wire, key, anything conductive. This is the one Apple denies actually exists despite overwhelming evidence that it is indeed a problem. This is also the reason Consumer Reports gave it a bad grade.

2. You can cause almost ANY phone's reception to drop to some degree by putting your hand near the antenna. It's called the capacitive effect and it's what makes the touch screen work on the iPhone (and others. Other phones use resistive touchscreens and you can manipulate those with a stylus, something you can't do with a capacitive screen). Usually cellphone antennas are already so poor that the effect doesn't matter. That is, you don't drop calls because of it. This is the one that Apple and Consumer Reports said happens to every phone.

3. The math formula used to compute how many bars you see on the screen is incorrect and Apple is going to generously update the system to correct that flaw. This is the one that, to me, makes no sense at all since previous iPhone indicated better reception yet, in reality, had worse reception than the iPhone 4. All I can figure it Apple made this one up in the hope that it would divert attention away from problem #1 because if this was ever a problem, I never once noticed it.

Don't confuse them, they're three seperate things.
 
The death grip also happens with my 3GS. I notched it for the first time last week after I took the case off to sell it.

I now have a new 8GB 3GS that has this also. This is nothing new for the iPhone.
 
Two separate issues, as explained in the post aboves......this has been discussed hundred times.
 
Went to my parents house today for lunch. They have poor ATT reception. Death grip on my Dad's 3GS kills bars, and completely kills 3G data. Comparison at that location between my ip4 and his 3GS: they performed about the same.
 
Yes, it does. I had a doctor come into our pharmacy the other day and asked to see his. I put the death grip on his and sure enough the bars started dropping.
 
Oh, I forgot to point out....#2 above is the "death grip" thing. All you "prove" by doing it is that you're alive and that cellphones use antennas.
 
i hope that when all of you guys are referring to the "death grip," that you're not literally squeezing the crap out of the phone. the reason the iP4 was criticized so much is because it would drop signal when just holding it comfortably in your left hand, not squeezing the crap out of it. the 3G/3GS, in my experience, only dropped bars (and that too only a few, not all the way down to zero) when you really squeezed it hard. with the iP4 however, all you have to do is hold it in your left hand, not squeezing, and you'll lose service. can you all please clarify what you mean by "death grip" because i don't think everyone gets it...
 
appleg33k said:
i hope that when all of you guys are referring to the "death grip," that you're not literally squeezing the crap out of the phone. the reason the iP4 was criticized so much is because it would drop signal when just holding it comfortably in your left hand, not squeezing the crap out of it. the 3G/3GS, in my experience, only dropped bars (and that too only a few, not all the way down to zero) when you really squeezed it hard. with the iP4 however, all you have to do is hold it in your left hand, not squeezing, and you'll lose service. can you all please clarify what you mean by "death grip" because i don't think everyone gets it...
Click to expand...

My 3GS drops the signal when I hold it in my hand just like I normally have with any other iPhone including my iPhone 4. There is no squeezing it.
 
I'm bringing my new 8GB 3GS back to AT&T in the morning for an exchange. It's doing some weird stuff such as losing signal when just sitting here. Email isn't coming in when it does on my iPhone 4, and the earpiece speaker sounds all distorted, almost like the speaker is broken. The earpiece problem is just plain annoying.
 
Yes, the 'death grip' was a poor choice of words. It should've just been called the 'left hand grip' or 'bridging the gap grip'. :)

And my 3G will have a very slight signal loss when doing this for 15 seconds or more. But it's very minor, won't cause dropped calls or slowed data rates. Which is why it isn't just any phone that will have this kind of signal loss when held in a normal way. Otherwise, there would have been a similar uproar with past iPhones.

It was easy to blame At&t back then, and if you ask me Apple did themselves a huge disservice by calibrating "the bars" the way they did to make it appear iPhones previously had a better signal than they did. Now not only do they have to undo that, but seemingly exaggerated the appearance of signal loss on iP4s in the minds of users.
 
I never used a case on my 3G and I hold my phone in the left normally.

I never noticed the bars falling from 5-1 in the year I have owned it.

After the iP4 came out and the "death grip" hysteria spread across the internet I tried it on my 3G running 4.0.

I held it like I always do and lo and behold the bars dropped from 5 to 1. I didn't squeeze the crap out of it either.
 
NO!

I can hold my 3G in 20 different ways in both good and poor reception areas and the bars do not drop.

But then the antenna isn't on the outside, my fingers aren't bridging any sealed gaps.
 
I never looked specifically because I didn't know I needed to, but I never lost a data stream holding it the wrong way in my left hand while surfing like I did with my 4.
 
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