iPhone Passes Singapore Test

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The bigwigs at Apple can rest easy now. The antenna “problem” of the iPhone 4 wasn’t that big of a deal after all, says Grace Chng of the Strait Times…

I had the iPhone 4 in a death grip. The phone rested on my palm and my thumb and fingers curled around it so tightly until my hand hurt. I was in basement 3 of 313@Somerset trying out Apple’s new phone which had received many complaints in the US about its poor reception.

I wanted to test whether the iPhone’s antenna was really as bad as US consumers made it out to be. Apple had built the antenna on the edges of the phone. There is a particular weak spot on the phone which when touched or gripped will disrupt signal strength, leading to poor reception.

As I walked to the MRT station at Somerset and among the shops in 313@Somerset, I held it bare, that is, with no phone case or bumper, the big rubber band-like casing that Apple sells. I gripped it tightly and watched the signal strength drop to one bar as I approached basement 3. I made a call, it went through, the conversation was clear.

I walked around some more. Made a couple more calls. Now the phone had switched to 2G which is as it should be because the 3G network is thinning out in the basement. The telcos here would automatically switch any call to 2G if the 3G network was unavailable or if there were too many people making calls in a particular area.

Looks like reception strength isn’t going to make the headlines in Asia that it did in the US.