Reality Distortion

Apple’s defense now, after the press conference on Friday, it to claim that all phones have attenuation problems. They even have video! John Gruber is in overdrive on the situation, with multiple links to videos with other phones who lose a couple of bars due to a “death grip.”

These are in addition to Apple calling out RIM and Nokia at the Friday press conference regarding a couple of their phones. They even posted some video showing how the signal gets attenuated, presumably causing a call loss.

It’s a good example of “the best defense is a good offense” and also of attempting to drag everyone else down into the muck. After all, if everyone else is guilty, then why single us out for scorn?

What they’re really doing here is distorting reality. As RIM and Nokia have both retorted in their statements, they’ve done a lot of research regarding how people hold their phones. The antennas in their phone are located accordingly. Inspecting the video’s, it becomes pretty obvious what Apple’s trick is.

The “death grip” on the other phones is quite literally a death grip. The user has to wrap their hand around the entire antenna to cause the signal loss. Using that technique, obviously even older designs with external antennas would see significant signal loss if a user chose to encapsulate the antenna with their hand. Heck, the phones with the extending antenna saw a difference in reception just between the antenna being fully extended versus retracted.

So the question now becomes, who actually uses the phone that way? Does anybody actually wrap their hand around a phone completely? No. Almost everyone in the world grips their phone between their finger tips. So in the real world, there is no signal attenuation with those phones because the phones aren’t used like Apple is showing.

Contrast this with the iPhone 4 antenna, where merely covering that gap on their external antenna with the pad of the thumb (or any finger) is sufficient to attenuate the signal. The difference is that a normal usage grip is sufficient to attenuate the signal and cause a call loss. The antenna’s signal properties are altered by the contact with the human skin, causing the signal attenuation. This property alteration is why RIM and Nokia and every other cell phone manufacturer has resigned themselves to putting the antenna inside the case. Because in there, to kill the signal requires an unrealistic usage of the phone.

The bottom line is that Apple has a problem. It’s not a huge problem, as they are quick to point out (it affects about 1% of users), but it’s a problem none the less. The fact is that their phone has a greatly increased probability of losing a phone call versus other phones because of their design decisions. That fact is almost certain to make potential users hesitant to buy iPhones.

So what did they do to address the problem?

Try to convince the world that all phones are like the iPhone; since, if everyone else’s phone does the same thing then it’s not an iPhone problem, but rather a cell phone problem. So now it’s a trumped up charge. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Reality is what you make it, right?