The new Verizon Wireless iPhone 4 gets you a new network and a new antenna, but it doesn't eliminate that pesky "death grip." We took a video to show how the Verizon iPhone drops bars just like the AT&T iPhone, when held tightly by the bottom without a bumper.

To the iPhone's credit, it's been shown before that various phones have varying "death grips." The AT&T iPhone's problem was that it's easier to attenuate the signal than it is on most phones; some people found that signal dropped a bit with one finger touching the wrong place. On the Verizon device, it's a bit tougher to demonstrate the effect: you have to hold the phone tightly by the bottom. With both phones, adding the Apple-recommended bumper (or any other case that covers the edges of the phone) eliminated the death-grip problem entirely in our tests.

It's still easier to create a death grip on the iPhone than on certain competitors. As we showed last year, to get the Motorola Droid X to drop signal, you have to clutch it in an awkward two-handed grip that no human would ever use. We don't expect the death grip to have any effect on Verizon iPhone sales, though; as the huge sales so far have shown, it's more of a curiosity and a talking point than anything that seems to affect purchases.