I like how you implied malicious intent over a totally pedestrian point to support your obvious biases (as if somebody using the dial pad could be interested in signal strength!) Nice try.

It's marketing designed to make the Droid X look bad. It's by definition malicious.

Honest question: is that not the app used to make calls on the Droid X? If it looks overcomplicated, how is that anyone's fault but Motorola/Google?

Apple certainly didn't design the interface for placing calls on a competitor's device.

All one would ordinarily do to check call strength is look at the home screen. For me the dialpad is a very infrequently used app, and I rarely use it to make calls.

In any case, why are you so hostile to the idea that Apple was being intentionally malicious? If I were trying to discredit a competitor's product, I too would choose the most unattractive space I could to highlight it. Given that the signal strength is shown in most apps, you certainly have a wide choice.

That is the app where (for most people) signal strength matters most. To me, it seems contextually relevant.

It's just less simpler than the home screen with a nice background, however, there is no reason why anyone would open the dialpad to carry this experiment.

Actually the demonstration is of the phone making a call and the bars dropping as a result of the way it's held.

You can tell the phone is engaged in a call by the dial button being a great big red "End Call" button, and by there being a little green call icon on the top left of the status bar.

Why this is a home-goal by Apple is that even though the bars dropped by the death grip, the phone did not drop the call.

The fundamental complaint about the iPhone 4 is that the death grip is causing dropped calls.

So Apple have gone and shown that whilst their competitors also are affected by the basic laws of science, they've managed to keep a base level of quality that avoids the consumer being affected by dropped calls.

Of course, we can over-analyze anything nowadays.

How come the call wasn't dropped when it hit 0 bars?

The video is about making calls. A dialpad seems reasonable.

Actually they were doing the Droid X a favor here. The lockscreen for the Droid X is so hideous Ars even featured it as an example of hot-messness.

Good point. My first thought was that "why would the keyboard be open by default?"