After hearing all about the “Grip of Death” associated with iPhone 4 and its ability to bring network signals and download speeds to their knees, and ultimately inspired by
Marco Arment’s own testing, I decided I’d try it out myself. Rather than seeing slower download speeds, mine seem to get faster when covering the antenna gap.
A few points:
- Clear’s wifi is at times awesome and at times horrible. It was horrible tonight.
- In my particular environment, the “Grip of Death” appears to be quite invigorating for my download speeds despite a one-bar drop in signal. The average DL speed was virtually unchanged from when it was sitting there untouched.
- It looks like the worst thing I can do is a) use my home wifi, or b) hold my phone other than how I would normally hold it.
- I am an antenna.
- While writing this post, I noticed my bars alternate between two and five simply due to AT&T’s network peculiarities. I wonder to what extent this GoD problem is exaggerated simply because of signal strength variations that happen on their own.
I spent literally the entire morning on the phone with tech support for two separate companies. It wasn’t because I was on hold for an unreasonable amount of time or because the support people were like you might have initially suspected.
It was because AT&T repeatedly dropped my calls. It happened five or six times throughout the course of the morning—inconvenient, sure, but even more so because I never talked to a single human.
Then I got wise and I called them over wifi with Skype! And I called the second one over 3G with iCall! And neither of them dropped my calls! And the sound quality was perfect!
Why am I giving so much money to AT&T? I essentially have no need for their services at this point outside of data. It’s painful to be forced to pay arbitrarily for something that is so dysfunctional when free, clearly superior alternatives are out there. Between RCN and AT&T, it’s enough to drive this Chicagoan crazy.
My iPhone has been acting strangely over the past week-and-a-half or so. I don’t think it’s an AT&T issue; it’s happening on wifi and five-bar 3G alike. Most disturbingly, it’s happening with basically every application I use that connects to the internet.
Gmail App alone has about five or six different error messages.
Is this happening to anyone else?
