Signal Tests: BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung and more Compared to iPhone 4

According to Apple, whenever you hold any mobile phone in your hand, it will lose signal and show fewer bars.  And after testing ten different handsets, we can confirm that they're right: only one of them didn't lose signal when we picked it up.

Last week, we looked at the iPhone 4's performance in eight different configurations and two separate locations.  To give you some context, we've tried the same test with a wider selection of mobiles, including some recent smartphones alongside some older handsetS.

We did all of the tests in our sound studio, where the walls are a good 40 cm thick.

iPhone 4 Worst Affected

Our tests showed that gripping a smartphone firmly in your hand does affect download speeds, with performance falling by 40% on the iPhone 4, 25% on the HTC Touch Diamond 2 on Windows Mobile and 14% on an iPhone 3G S updated to iOS 4.

By comparison, the fall of just 5% on the HTC Legend is hardly noticeable, while our BlackBerry, a Bold 9700, didn't budge an inch, despite Steve Jobs' suggestion to the contrary.  We spent hours holding it in unusual positions, gripping it first with one hand, then two, holding it on the sides, at the top and bottom and so on.  It maintained the same speed throughout—but was still a lot slower than the iPhone 4, even gripped with the left hand exactly where it shouldn't be.  But that's partly down to the fact that networks often cap the speeds of their non-iPhone users, which stunts the results for the others.  Overall, that makes the potential for frustration somewhat limited.

We checked the HTC Legend's disappointing results several times over, both in Chrome Mobile and Opera Mini, but that didn't help.

How many bars?

• No hands: we put each phone on the table, and recorded the average number of bars shown during the test.
• Hands on: we gripped the phone tightly with both hands, with our fingers running across the top.

 

In our studio, where the signal is pretty average, nearly every phone reported signal loss when we held them.  On the other hand, it's interesting to note that the drop in the number of bars on screen (sometimes two or even three) isn't necessarily proportional to the raw speeds we recorded.

For example, the HTC Diamond 2 falls from an average of 3.5 bars on the desk to just 2.0 when you pick it up.  That's a fall of 43%, but the actual speeds only fell by 25%.  It's the same story with the Legend: the number of bars shown on screen fell by 43%, but the actual change was just 5%.

If one thing is clear, it's that Apple isn't the only one having trouble finding an algorithm that accurately reflects signal strength ...


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