HambliDesign

The Verizon iPhone is here and it's a beautiful thing. Well, it's the same old beautiful thing, with some slight modifications—the antenna's been reworked for Verizon's CDMA network. But will it fix the iPhone's death grip issue?

Check it out: the original AT&T iPhone 4's antenna notches have been shuffled. Instead of three (two on the bottom corners, one on top by the headphone jack), there are now four—one at each corner. The Verizon's extra notch appears at the top left, and the headphone jack notch has slid down to just above the mute button at top left.

NYT says Apple's Tim Cook confirmed that the antenna design had to be optimized for the phone's new CDMA guts, which justifies a slight design modification.

But what's unclear is if the new four-notch design will alleviate the death grip issues which plagued the AT&T iPhone 4 on it's arrival. If you'll recall, users were quick to notice that squeezing the iPhone 4 tightly—especially so that the antenna notch on the lower left corner of the phone was bridged—caused a rapid and significant decrease in signal. It turns out that such is the case with a lot of smartphones, but the permitter antenna design of the iPhone 4 seemed to exacerbate the problem.

Will the Verizon iPhone 4's tweaked antenna fix the problem? We'll have to wait and see. We'll be updating here as soon as we can find word of someone trying a death grip.