I went into an O2 store today. I was merely looking to handle the new iPhone 4, to see how it looked like in person, to see how it felt in my hand and… obviously, to test the death grip, or, more correctly, the death touch. Yes, you don’t really have to grip it like Steve J. suggests, you really just have to touch it on that joint point on the bottom left corner of the phone and the signal goes all the way down to just two, and then one bar. You can clearly see the effects of the new firmware though, it no longer goes into no signal, it will still tell you that there’s some signal, while in fact it’s probably impossible to make any calls at that point. But anyway, I was there, I tested it. I didn’t grip the iPhone, I merely pressed my index finger against that tiny little spot and the signal instantly started dropping from the full five bars to two bars and ultimately to just one bar. Similarly, as soon as I raised my finger from that spot, it gained back the signal to full strength. This is why I’m dubbing this issue not “death grip” but “death touch”.