Nokia: How To Hold Your Phone, Reception Problem

June 29, 2010

Nokia is tak­ing a jab at the iPhone 4′s recep­tion issue, some­thing Steve Jobs is deny­ing (read Steve Jobs On iPhone 4: “There Is No Reception Issue. Stay Tuned.”). Nokia pos­tu­lates in How do you hold your Nokia? four ways you can hold your Nokia phone:

  • Thumb and finger
  • The cup
  • The bal­ance
  • The four edge grip

And here’s what Nokia states:

We’ve found any of the four grips men­tioned above to be both com­fort­able and as you can see, offer no sig­nal degra­da­tion what­so­ever. This isn’t a fea­ture you’ll only find on high-end Nokia devices either. It’s some­thing that’s been a part of pretty much every Nokia device ever made (per­haps with the excep­tion of that teardrop 3G one, which was a bit ridiculous).

The key func­tion on any Nokia device is its abil­ity to make phone calls. After all, that’s why we know them uni­ver­sally as mobile phones (or smart phones, fea­ture phones or mobile com­put­ers – though the same grip styles work for those, too). One of the main things we’ve found about the 1 bil­lion plus Nokia devices that are in use today is that when mak­ing a phone call, peo­ple gen­er­ally tend to hold their phone like a…. well, like a phone. Providing a wide range of meth­ods and grips for peo­ple to hold their phones, with­out inter­fer­ing with the anten­nae, has been an essen­tial fea­ture of every device Nokia has built.

Of course, feel free to ignore all of the above because real­is­ti­cally, you’re free to hold your Nokia device any way you like. And you won’t suf­fer any sig­nal loss. Cool, huh?

Well, no. User SmackMule has some recep­tion prob­lems with his Nokia E71, recorded and posted up on YouTube for every­one to see: “Nokia E71 Reception Problems“. He even has an AT&T Femtocell instal­la­tion at home that brings the con­nec­tion up to five bars from a max­i­mum of three bars before. When he holds the E71 the five bars drop down to… zero. When he puts it back down on the table the five bars reap­pear. In the com­ments he men­tions that he is cup­ping the E71. I guess “the cup” is not a viable method on the E71. There is the off chance that his E71 could be a lemon, but this might be a more industry-wide prob­lem. Are you a Nokia user? Have you had any recep­tion prob­lems like this?