Apple: Hold Different

Shortly after the release of the iPhone 4, it was discovered that if you hold the phone by the bottom of the antenna band wrapped around the phone, it will lose reception. The problem is unofficially called “the iPhone death grip.”

Steve Jobs’ solution? Don’t hold it that way.

Steve Jobs’ reply in the email above seemed “authoritarian,” an image attributed to Apple due to the way they manage the App Store, their ban on cross platform coding, and falling-out with Adobe. The fact that Steve Jobs himself appears to be holding the iPhone in a similar manner only reinforced that image.

The issue became a hot topic on the AppleInsider forums, and was soon caught on by social bookmarking websites such as Reddit and Digg:

• Reddit:
  
  • Really? I’m holding it wrong??
  • How to hold the iPhone 4G: [PIC]
  • I fixed the iPhone 4 “holding” problem
  • iPhone
• Digg:
  
  • The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Holding the iPhone 4
  • iPhone Testing
  • iPhone 5 preview
• Twitter:
  
  
  • Robert Taylor
  • Faruk Ateş

Thus, a new meme was born for Apple: “Hold Different.” It even has its own apparel. The meme is a play on Apple’s 1997 advertising campaign “Think Different.”

Robert Taylor originally came up with the slogan, which was made popular on Twitter by Robert Scoble. The image has been very popular on Tumblr and Reddit and has also appeared a couple of times on Engadget.

Several technology blogs have also caught on to this meme:

• MobileCrunch: Doing my part for the iPhone 4 “death grip” meme
  
• Gizmodo: How to Get Full Bars With the iPhone 4
  
• MobileCrunch: iOS update to ship early next week, fix death grip issue?
  
• The Next Web: Hey Apple, you’re holding it wrong!

Even Nokia has caught on to the trend.

Apple’s Response

On July 2nd, Apple announced a software patch for the iPhone 4. Apple explained that the sudden loss of signal was caused by a software mistake:

“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.”

However, Gizmondo reported that this would not change the antenna’s reception difficulties, meaning that it was still necessary to “hold different”.