Nokia has taken no time in mocking Apple and its iPhone 4 problems, by releasing a tongue-in-cheek 'How do you hold your Nokia?' feature.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you won't have failed to have noticed that Apple's iPhone 4 release was overshadowed with the fact that the phone's antenna fails to work properly when you hold the phone in your left hand.
Nokia knows this and has written a feature that shows you the many ways you can hold a Nokia phone, without reception woes.
Shown on its official Nokia conversations blog, the piece may not explicitly name-check Apple but it is easy to see which company it is taking the Michael out of.
As the feature explains: "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."
Hold your own
The blog goes on to note: "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?"
Nokia has been a bit of a whipping boy for the mobile phone world recently. Overshadowed by both Google and Apple, the company's phones aren't exactly flavour of the month at the moment.
So it is good to see that the company still has a little bit of humour left in it.
UPDATE
It seems that Nokia hasn't exactly been without its reception woes. There are a number of videos on YouTube showing that its phones also drop reception when held.
Nokia maybe should have checked this out before making fun of its opposition.
One of the videos of Nokia's own antenna problems is below (thanks to commenters 'healeydave' and 'dvs' for the heads-up).
Via The Next Web
Your comments (4) Click to add a new comment
windywoo
June 29th 2010
4. My Nokia 5800 came with instructions that showed where the antenna were and a warning that obstructing them might result in signal loss. It didn't seem to make any difference what way I held it and there was no way I was going to twist my hands into unnatural positions to avoid the antenna anyway. The iPhone problem seems a bit more obvious since the actual case design is supposed to increase signal but seems to have backfired on them.
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craigio86
June 28th 2010
3. Every phone I've ever had has significantly better reception when lying flat on a surface. Pick it up and it nearly always drops. When I had Samsung handsets, it was a common-knowledge trick that if you lost reception, holding the phone upside down would make a signal more likely.
Not that I'm sticking up for Apple. If I was paying nearly £600 for a phone, I wouldn't take kindly to being told that I had to avoid holding it in my left hand.
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dvs
June 28th 2010
2. Nokia shouldn't laugh at other people's misfortunes.
I bought a Nokia E52 which struggled making calls (kept cutting out the voice). Problem was widely report of their own forums but Nokia wouldn't refund or replace with a new phone. I wrote complaint letters and never received any replies. I then took legal action and once a court date was set, they suddenly wanted to help.
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healeydave
June 28th 2010
1. Nokia obviously has selective memory about their own phones :-)
Although I could remember seeing this over the years on other handsets , I thought I would do a quick check to see if there was any pre-existing videos about. It didn't take long to find some. These are not recent either, most of them were posted month's or even years ago!
Here's a few examples of specifically reception drops when holding various handsets:
HTC Droid Incredible:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaDE941PzQk
Nexus One:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2g5J4qPp54
Nokia E71:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi1gHDa7-X0
Nokia 6230:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_RP7Fn1w8Q
Nokia 6720:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7t75Uo6qQ
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