Verizon iPhone 4 Death Grip & Death Hug Prove This Apple Phone Isn’t Perfect Either

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We covered the whole Antennagate / Death Grip issue of the GSM iPhone 4 pretty consistently back in summer 2010, since it’s definitely one of the biggest Apple fails when it comes to designing a flagship product. Sure, phones weren’t, aren’t and will never be perfect but the Death Grip was there, and there’s no question about that. Just ask Consumer Reports.

Naturally we covered the antenna design changes of the Verizon iPhone 4 also and we kept our ear to the ground for any potential CDMA iPhone 4 Antennagates. And I tend to believe that Apple has somewhat fixed the problem by changing the antenna design. There’s also the issue that they will never acknowledge the fact they changed the external address to prevent any signal losses as they’ll say the changes made were necessary to accommodate CDMA support.

But we’ll move past that detail for now and look at a recent video that shows the Verizon iPhone 4 being affected by both the Death Grip and a new Hug Grip.

As much as we’d love to take a hit at Apple for not having the guts to admit their failed external antenna design, we will admit that the 7-minute video below is not exactly relevant. I mean look how the phone is held in one’s hand. Can anyone honestly say he or she would hold the phone like that when talking (Death Grip) or when texting or surfing the web in landscape mode (Death Hug)? Would you be able to do any of that while holding it like that?

Sure if you hug the phone like that and bridge all those antenna parts, well, you’ll end up in an Antennagate situation. But really it can’t be compared to the GSM iPhone 4 issue. The GSM iPhone 4’s death grip was a lot more problematic as it would appear as soon as you’d cover that left lower corner of the phone with your hand while on a phone call (see above our own Death Grip experience in the Opera Apple Store in France). But the CDMA iPhone 4 has an antenna with some extra gaps, which they all have to be covered simultaneously by your hand to replicate the problem. That leads to the video below, which, while showing the Verizon iPhone 4 does suffer from signal attenuation, is pretty exaggerated.

We’ll be waiting for actual Death Grip/Hug reports from CDMA iPhone 4 users, so hit the comment section below.