Apple CEO Steve Jobs led a news conference today to explain what he’s now dubbed “Antennagate” — and he called out a couple of other smartphones to show that the iPhone 4 isn’t the only one to drop signal strength when held. On the Android side, Apple chose the HTC Droid Eris, which has since been replaced by the HTC Droid Incredible.
We get it. A whole lot of people have had their eyes opened to the wonderful world of RF engineering, and suddenly we’re all amateur EEs and are going to be watching our “bars” — the little lines that approximate signal strength. Fine. And there’s chatter going on that the new Samsung Galaxy S phones have the same sort of “death grip.”
Fact is, you’re likely to see signal attenuation on any phone. And if you want to stare at your bars all day, be our guest. Where we start to worry is when calls are dropped. And that’s always going to be a marriage between hardware design and network capability.
Our suggestion: Everybody relax a tad. This iPhone thing might well be blown out of proportion. Or it might well be bigger than we think. Frankly, we’re not going to let it drag us down. While Apple fans have a single phone on which to focus, Android has more phones than we know what to do with. We’ll judge call quality the same way we always have — by using the phone and making calls.
(Oh, and Jobs’ crack about nobody wanting to buy that “Hummer” of a Droid X? We think that’s been disproven, right?)