For those who have been paying attention to Apple’s so called “antenagate” fiasco with the new iPhone 4, you may have heard that Steve jobs came out pointing fingers at everyone else during last Friday’s press conference. Steve made the claim that all smartphones suffer from reception issues based on how you hold them. Apple went the extra mile to prove their point by demonstration the “grip of death” on a few competing smartphones, one being the discontinued HTC DROID Eris.
The demonstration show the DROID Eris losing reception bars while being held in the left hand with the palm covering up the bottom left corner of the handset. As Apple predicted, the reception hard slowly disappeared after nearly 25 seconds.
While this test does indicate that the Eris does suffer from a similar reception issue as the iPhone 4, HTC has decided to speak up and let their customers know that the issue isn’t quite as bad as what the video shows. HTC’s Eric Lin was in contact with Pocket-Lint over the weekend, stating that approximately 0.016% of DROID Eris customers have actually complained about reception or antenna problems with the DROID Eris. To put that into perspective, that 0.016% is just over 34 times less than the 0.55% of iPhone 4 customers who have contacted Apple about reception issues.
It’s clear that some smartphones have some reception issues to resolve, but we don’t really like it when Apple tries comparing their issues with HTC when in fact they are not even in the same league.
Source: Pocket-lint
Videos: Engadget
