I GRIPPED the iPhone 4 until the edges of the cellphone left an imprint on my palm. Conversations were clear and I suffered no drop calls.
I had the iPhone 4 in a death grip. The phone rested on my palm and my thumb and fingers curled around it so tightly until my hand hurt. I was in basement 3 of 313@Somerset trying out Apple’s new phone which had received many complaints in the US about its poor reception.
I wanted to test whether the iPhone’s antenna was really as bad as US consumers made it out to be. Apple had built the antenna on the edges of the phone. There is a particular weak spot on the phone which when touched or gripped will disrupt signal strength, leading to poor reception.
It wasn’t a substantive test. I would have liked to try it in Tuas, Woodlands and in several basements of buildings for at least a day. But I only had half an hour, so I walked to the deepest basement I could find at that time.
As I walked to the MRT station at Somerset and among the shops in 313@Somerset, I held it bare, that is, with no phone case or bumper, the big rubber band-like casing that Apple sells. I gripped it tightly and watched the signal strength drop to one bar as I approached basement 3. I made a call, it went through, the conversation was clear.
I walked around some more. Made a couple more calls. Now the phone had switched to 2G which is as it should be because the 3G network is thinning out in the basement. The telcos here would automatically switch any call to 2G if the 3G network was unavailable or if there were too many people making calls in a particular area.
To check if my short test was accurate, I text my friend in Hongkong, Bien Perez, a journalist with the South China Morning Post. He too did a similar test. 'I squeezed the hell out of it; held its sides tight like I would a tennis racket on my serve. I’d no problem.'
In fact, he found the antenna is much improved, giving him better reception in the 'dead zones' in Hongkong where people commonly found it hard to make calls because phone signals were low or non-existent.
Bien and I came to a similar conclusion, that the 3G network coverage in Hongkong and Singapore are much better than AT&T (which is the only telco to sell iPhones) in the US. So reception is going to be much better in these countries. That’s not to say that there won’t be reception problems but I believe the problems will be fewer.