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Of course, it's possible to get any phone to lose a bit of signal if you cover the antenna with your hands, but I'm wondering if the Verizon iPhone 4 also suffers from the attenuation issues that the AT&T iPhone 4 famously suffered from last summer:

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ArsTechnica notes that there is no noticeable signal loss when gripping it with the 'death grip'. Though due to the way smart phone antennas are designed, it still may be possible

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  • Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Suntimes noted that there was no official response when asked about an antenna redesign. Glad to see that ArsTechnica tested it out :)
    – Ryan Sharp
    Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 20:41
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As an add-on to the Ars report: photos of the adjustment of button locations also show differing locations of the breaks in the metal band around the device, so it's quite possible there was a real hardware change.

Verizon vs AT&T iPhone buttons

Other pictures show different breaks near the bottom of the phone, too.

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  • it had to be a hardware change because of the different radios. But I am sure they took the time to work on it to make it better than before.
    – jmlumpkin
    Commented Jan 12, 2011 at 13:16
  • @jmlumpkin Yeah, certainly. I meant a hardware change beyond replacing the radio chip, some other physical changes.
    – Matthew Frederick
    Commented Jan 12, 2011 at 15:14
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The flaw is in the iPhone 4's antenna design, not the network or carrier. So, I would say yes. The software "fix" they released is supposed to make the bars depict signal quality more accurately, so you may find that while on Verizon, "the death grip" doesn't affect signal quality at all or as much.. but that doesn't negate that the antenna design itself is flawed physically, and that's why "the death grip" has any affect on signal quality.

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    To be fair, iPhone users the world over have not seen this issue in any consistently replicable fashion. The only documented pattern seen at large by users has been centric to AT&T customers.
    – David Metcalfe
    Commented Jan 12, 2011 at 7:01
  • @David Interesting! I never thought it was a big deal anyway.
    – Harv
    Commented Jan 12, 2011 at 23:40
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Slashgear confirms that the Verizon iPhone 4 does not suffer from the death grip:

We put our hand in the standard “death grip” location, making sure that we covered up all of the right spots, and held onto the device for up to a minute. When we started the test, the device was at four bars. It should be noted that full service is represented on the iPhone 4 with 5 bars. So, the test started with only four bars being shown. As we held the device, and we timed it at a minute, we watched as only one bar disappeared.

We then put our fingers over certain points on the device. Making sure to cover up the “new” top portion of the antenna, and we still couldn’t reproduce the “death grip” symptoms that plagued the initial launch of the iPhone 4. You can check out the images from our test below, but it looks like Verizon’s confidence in the iPhone 4 on their network seem to be pretty sound.

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