The Windows Phone 7-running HTC HD7 smartphone is the latest to be said to suffer from the "death grip"-the antenna problem that first plagued the iPhone 4.
The
HTC HD7 appears to be the latest smartphone to fall victim to the antenna "death
grip," according to reports.
In a video from YouTube that is making the rounds, the phone is seen
dropping bars when encircled in a meaty mitt-the so-called death grip-and then
regaining them when released.
Beyond the obvious damage control, it seems Apple CEO
Steve Jobs may have been on to something when, during a July 16 press
conference-called to address what Jobs then dubbed "Antennagate"-he
insisted that the iPhone 4 wasn't alone in losing service bars when held with
its bottom right corner covered (its right, your left). Many consumers,
however, didn't find this to be true of their phones, and Apple allayed the
criticisms that were building around the matter by offering free rubber bumpers
to those whose devices were faulty in this way-though it soon after rescinded
the offer, saying that fewer devices were affected than was first
thought.
Still, some Samsung Galaxy S phones seemed to suffer the same fate-which
likewise was captured in video, posted to YouTube and widely circulated-though,
as with the iPhone 4, the issue did little to curb sales. Samsung sold 1 million
Galaxy S phones within 45 days of making them available. (During its
third-quarter earnings call, Apple announced that it sold 8.4 million iPhones
during the quarter.)
Samsung appeared to be addressing the issue, however, in an application it
recently submitted to the Federal Communications Commission for what is widely
considered to be Samsung's Nexus S, for Google. In the application, it states
that the phone is "identical" to a previously certified device-both
support cellular/PCS, GSM/EDGE and AWS
WCDMA, as well as WLAN and Bluetooth-except its WiFi and GPS
receiver antennas are different.
If the HD7 is suffering from a similar issue, executives at HTC-and
T-Mobile-will surely be hoping that consumers are equally forgiving of the
matter.
Microsoft introduced the HD7 Oct. 11, along with four other devices running
its new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system. Exclusive to T-Mobile, the HD7
features a 4.3-inch touch display, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a kickstand for
propping the device when viewing videos and a handful of entertainment
applications, including T-Mobile TV, Netflix, Slacker Radio, Zune and Zbox
Live.
Also included is GPS with turn-by-turn
navigation, a 5-megapixel camera, Internet Explorer 8 and 16GB of internal
memory. Like the other Windows Phone 7 handsets, the HD7 features Live Tiles,
which replace static application icons with real-time updating tiles.
"We set out to build a phone that was thoroughly modern,"
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said at a New
York City event introducing the phone. "Modern in
the hardware we use, modern in its design principles. ... We hope you agree that,
with all of that in mind, we've taken a very different tact."
Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.
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