Antennagate 2: Verizon iPhone 4 Drops Calls With “Death Grip” [REPORT]

Remember Antennagate? It’s back — this time on Verizon. Stalwart reviews magazine Consumer Reports just announced it will not list the Verizon iPhone 4 among its recommended smartphones because holding it in a “specific but quite natural way can cause dropped calls.”
Shortly after the launch of the iPhone 4 on AT&T, reports began to emerge that the phone would lose signal and drop calls if held in a certain way — the so-called “death grip.” Apple called a press conference, gave its iPhone 4 customers free bumpers that helped solve the issue and announced it was largely AT&T’s fault.
If anything, this news is worse than the first Antennagate. Apple has had time to solve the problem and avoid another PR nightmare. This comes straight from a highly trusted source; the flaw was discovered through rigorous lab tests, rather than anecdotal evidence. There have been few complaints so far on the part of users, so Apple — which is trying to focus on next week’s highly anticipated iPad 2 launch — may not have been expecting this distraction. And one of the top reasons AT&T iPhone owners have given for switching to Verizon is the relative quality of voice calls.
“The phone performs superbly in most other respects, and using the iPhone 4 with a case can alleviate the problem,” Consumer Reports wrote in a blog post. But it couldn’t ignore the death grip problem, which is caused by a gap in the casing and is not found on any other smartphone the magazine tested:
“As with our tests of the AT&T iPhone 4, putting a finger across one particular gap — the one on the lower left side — caused performance to decline. Bridging this gap is easy to do inadvertently, especially when the phone is in your palm, which might readily and continuously cover the gap during a call,” the publication says.
The problem only appears to occur if the cell signal strength isn’t at its strongest, but that is a problem you’re going to run into, even on a relatively reliable network like Verizon.
Are you a Verizon iPhone 4 user? Have you experienced mysterious dropped calls? Let us know in the comments.