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Comment by bombs | Hacker News Reader

If the antenna is internal (and invisible) how many would even realise they were affecting it in any way? Apple drew a lot of attention to its antenna, both in terms of design and marketing, so how many people reported problems after deliberately trying to screw with it?

I just made my iPhone 3GS, Blackberry 9700 and Nokia N97 all drop a couple of bars by covering their internal antennas with my palm. I expect this to happen with any phone.

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I think you've missed the point.

With the iPhone 4, it's possible to reproduce this issue by holding the phone in a very natural way. The fact that other phones also lose reception but only if you hold them in a special way clearly isn't a problem - if it were it would have created a big stink.

And if you think people are deliberately making a big production out of this to screw with Apple, then why wasn't it done with earlier models of the iPhone?

Ugh. We know it's easy to intentionally reproduce the problem. But the only data anyone has suggests that, in practice, it doesn't seem to be affecting people much, just like I'm sure deathgrips aren't affecting BB users much. Can we move on from Antennagate now? Maybe talk about Erlang instead?

I dropped a ton of calls before getting a case. That being said the real scandal here has zero to do with the antenna and everything to do with Steve Jobs ham handed response. If they just owned up we wouldn't be tAlking about it as the fix is pretty simple and effective. I suspect jobs didn't because he saw the antenna as a feature instead of a bug.

It was just pointed out that the data show that this problem is affecting a vanishingly small proportion of users in practice. Your counterpoint is an anecdotal pronouncement that it happens to you. That’s great—but it still doesn’t happen for most people. If we’re peddling in anecdotes, then for the record in the three weeks I’ve been using my iPhone 4 I have been completely unable to reproduce the antenna problem on mine in any way, shape, or form: it simply doesn’t happen. Takeaway: anecdotes are nearly completely worthless to be throwing around.

I find it interesting in that the responses from HTC, BB and Nokia, none of them deny the problems that Steve highlighted with their phones. None of them have come out and called him a liar, they are just upset that they are being caught up in this antenna saga.

The point is that you can have the same effect on an iPhone 4 with your pinky.

That hasn't been easy to reproduce though. Some people, in some places, but not like the "death grip".

Looks easy to me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgouzUMlQpY

That's one person in one place. It's not easy to reproduce for a lot of people.

Though the ease of producing the problem on the iPhone 4 is very real, this argument annoys me:

No one touches their pinky over that line in normal use. Does it cause a problem? Yes. Does anyone just sit there with one finger on the side of the phone? No.

Instead, say that a grip natural to a large number of users causes signal loss.

What? I don't have an iPhone 4 but the way I hold my phone, all of my fingers are on the left side of it. I would touch the "spot of death" every time I made a call.

I do touch the line with my pinky in normal use all the time. Maybe I have an abnormally shaped hand, I don't know. That being said, I love my new iPhone 4, I'm a new convert from Android and I don't really have reception problems.

That's legitimate, but the problem isn't "your pinky touches the line" its "my grip (and it's not an odd grip) causes my pinky to touch the line".

People making videos of an iPhone on a table, and one finger coming up and touching it are alarmist ways of treating the problem. Not that its not a very serious real problem, but let's be reasonable and only talk about the issues it has when we're actually using it.

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