I have an LG L70 and I noticed it has low signal strength compared to what I am used to and compared to other phones. I’m looking to upgrade and I started wondering in today’s cell phone market do different phones have different signal strengths or is my particular phone just a dog for whatever manufacturing reason?
How did you notice it has low signal strength? What are you measuring it with?
If you are just going by how many bars are on the display, that’s kinda meaningless. The scale of those bars is whatever the manufacturer of the phone decides it should be. Three bars on one phone could be the equivalent of two bars on another. That doesn’t mean that the one with two bars is getting less signal.
The spec you really want to look at is called “receiver sensitivity”. Good luck, though. A lot of cell phone manufacturers don’t publish their receiver sensitivity.
I measured signal strength empirically through reception (mine and who I’m talking to). I also used the phone settings (around -100dB to -105 dB in my house) and OpenSignal.
In my experience signal strength is more a function of your carrier and your geographic location than your phone model. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter at all, and a particular phone that’s defective might have trouble no matter where you send and receive calls. But I rarely see cellular reception being a selling point for a particular phone, and as others have said it’s going to be hard to choose a phone by that criterion.
Purely anecdotal, but an LG phone was the worst for me in terms of reception in a remote area with very spotty cell coverage.
In the same location both an iPhone and a really cheap Alcatel both get good connections but the LG can’t find a network 3/4 of the time. If I take the same phone into town where coverage is better it works fine.
Since I’ve only ever tried that one LG phone it could just be a bad antenna or something in that one particular phone.
Whether it’s a design flaw or manufacturing defect, or pure coincidence though, LG phones in particular do seem to have a bad rep with regard to signal reception as seen with a quick google search.
Also anecdotal, but on a road trip where 4 of the 5 of us in the car got absolutely no signal at all on our mix of various model iPhones and Androids, one person with a Nokia that sells for about 25 dollars had a good signal and could still make calls.