UK HTC Legend Owners Dissatisfied With Lack of Support Regarding Signal Issues
Apple's iPhone 4 famously received criticism for the poor placement of the antenna (a metal rim surrounding the device), which lead to thousands of users complaining of signal loss when the phone was held in a certain way. The term 'death grip' was coined for this phenomenon.
Apple's cure was to give away a free bumper (a case that would prevent direct contact between the hand and antenna, thus eliminating any reception issues) to iPhone owners.
The HTC Legend was the first smartphone to be constructed from one single piece of machined aluminium; while this looked great, it was obvious from the outset that the Legend would suffer the same issues as the iPhone 4. When users started complaining of sporadic signal fluctuation on their Legends over on the Vodafone UK eForums, Vodafone and HTC released a series of firmware updates in the (vain) attempt at curing the reception problem.
The main issue was that the antenna of the Legend was encased in a removable plastic battery door at the bottom of the phone, and most people tend to clasp their hand around this area of their device in everyday use: the evidence is already present for a serious design fault, by HTC themselves.
The aforementioned eForum thread currently has hundreds of posts from very angry Legend owners demanding some kind of acknowledgement of this issue from Vodafone UK themselves, however the obvious lack of communication within Vodafone as well as their various attempts to silence dissatisfied Legend owners simply isn't the way to deal with this kind of issue.
The issue also seems to be, with a few exceptions, exclusive to Vodafone UK-branded Legends, suggesting that this is a combination of hardware and software defects. It's clear that the firmware updates are not solving the issue, and for my Legend it's actually made antenna performance worse.
So what's next for Legend owners? As an owner of this very expensive paperweight myself, I'll be waiting for an official update to Android 2.2 Froyo. If this doesn't provide some improvement, I'll be looking at purchasing a different Android device, unless Vodafone UK provide some kind of insurance, which, to be brutally honest, is unlikely given their attitude toward this problem.
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