The iPhone Death Grip – What Is It?

The iPhone 4 is already the fourth generation of the always-popular iPhone, one of the top smart phones available on the market today. Competing with contenders like the Droid and the BlackBerry, Apple is always looking for new ways to innovate, invent, and ultimately, separate itself from the crowd.

So why can’t they even figure out something as simple as allowing you to hold it whichever way you please? As it turns out, they can. But we'll get to that.

Before talk about why some people struggle to correctly hold an iPhone 4 - which we are affectionately dubbing the iPhone grip - it will help to understand exactly why on earth people think an iPhone in this new decade of the 2010s gets better reception if you hold it a certain way.

It’s Not All Bad

Admittedly, not everything went wrong with the Apple iPhone 4 when it was launched in just the past few months. As The Australian will tell you,  “the new iPhone 4 is very responsive and has the best touch screen in the business.” In other words, there was a lot to like about the iPhone 4 when it was first launched. Other features, like an HD-capable video camera, helped generate some buzz and excitement when the latest iPhone incarnation was unveiled in America.

Of course, that’s exactly what people have come to expect from the iPhone, the smart phone that launched a series of imitators who, in recent years, have become something more closely resembling serious competitors. Even so, the iPhone seems to dominate the market and the buzz-o-meter with solid consistency.

Until that PR nightmare known as the iPhone “death” grip. But how serious was the issue really?

How to Hold an iPhone in 2010

Says The Australian: “Hold an iPhone 4 with what most would regard as a normal grip and watch one or two bars fall away from the network reception meter at the top left of the phone's screen.” Yes, like a radio.

One can see how something known as an iPhone “death grip” could represent a potential public relations nightmare, but the REM cycle doesn’t end there. As you’ll see at Engadget, the problem was made worse when Apple chief Steve Jobs responded to an email about the death grip by saying, quite simply, “Just avoid holding it in that way.”

It’s not exactly an encouraging reply from one of the world’s top innovators, and recalls Henry Ford when he said that the customer can have whatsoever color he likes, just so long as that color is black.

But are things as they seem? Steve Fenech notes that his iPhone 4 works fine, with no big problems in terms of reception. Said Fenech of the antennae issue: "I've been using Apple's new iPhone 4, which went on sale in Australia today, for nearly a week and I can say it's not an issue at all."

So what is the “iPhone grip”? In contrast to the iPhone death grip - the grip that causes you to lose reception - some people have been sharing the correct iPhone holding technique in order to maintain the quality of the rest of the iPhone’s enthralling features without losing any reception. A recent Google search of “how to hold an iphone” yielded almost 100,000,000 million results.

You don't have to become part of the crowd that looks for answers before you find out if the iPhone 4 really works for you.

Conclusions

There do indeed seem to be some problems with the way iPhone 4 units are functioning when it comes to reception, but as it turns out, many of the problems are simply overblown. Make sure that you understand the full context of exactly what's going on with the iPhone "death grip" before you buy one of your own - or before you completely rule out the purchase.