gdgt

At gdgt HQ we get 5 bars AT&T coverage, so it's hard to tell just what kind of impact touching the iPhone 4's corner of death really has. This obviously isn't a massively scientific study or anything, but I did some initial testing with the phone flat and stationary on the table, and saw consistent results:

When not touched at all and when touched with a single finger to the lower left antenna contact point that causes the issues, with the gdgt Incipio iPhone 4 case on, the iPhone always seems to hover consistently at 70db.

When not touched at all, with no case, the iPhone's db seems to stay in the low -60s (usually -61 through -63).

When touching it with a single finger on the lower contact point that causes all the issues, with no case, that reception drops to high -70s (usually -76 through -79).

So the case seems to negatively degrade performance by a slight amount, but not nearly as much as touching the lower left contact point, which degrades performance almost enough to drop it from 5 to 4 bars in this area. (As a reminder, signal quality is logarithmic -- not linear -- and the closer the db is to zero, the better the signal quality; the further from zero, the worse it is.)

For a little background on db:bar signal strength mapping, check out AnandTech's really awesome piece on the topic: www.anandtech.com­/show­/3821­/iphone­-4­-redux­-analyzi...

Signal strength tip via Giz: gizmodo.com­/5633290­/test­-your­-iphone­-4s­-antenna­-re...