I live in a rural area, I have no strong signal on any network to be honest, My Samsung is rubbish in weak signal areas, it does something I've not seen any other mobile phone doing. Your sitting with with maybe 2 bars signal, you assume you have signal but when you swipe down you have "EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY" So it obviously logs onto some other network to enable you to make an emergency call which is very misleading.

I have heard the radios in Motorola phones are good in weak signal areas

Thats because the signal bars on your phone mean sweet fanny adams.

The only thing you can properly measure by the bar is pressure, what bars are displayed on each phone is up to the maker or software. If you're going to compare, you'd need to get an app to see the real received signal and compare across devices.

Telstra (Australia) have some handsets specifically marked as good (based on their testing) for signal pick up, which they call 'blue tick': https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-ph.../sort/featured

HTC one is very good, full signal and able to make calls where I live , my wife's Samsung galaxy no signal it doesn't have the best antenna. Having an app does help but if you can't call out then it's not much point

The best phone I have ever used for signal (measured by dBm not bars) was the iPhone 4s. It just went on forever and ever. Still impresses me to this day.

Motorola devices are quite good too. HTC also do well.

Samsung devices are poor, very poor.

Huawei is a recent favourite of a few people here.

Thats probably an indication of the network offering the emergency call.

Yes some network, not my network, I don't need to see this information. No other manufacturer does this, I remember my old Galaxy S2 doing this, my S5 does the exact same.

Ofcom commissioned some testing into the signal variation of different handsets recently. Unfortunately they aren't saying which models Device 1, Device 2,3 etc refer to as the tests were to inform them about suitable thresholds for their own coverage maps and reports although the iPhone was obviously either device 1 or 2

The results are here http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/mar...ndset-testing/

In general smartphones are worse than dumb phones and no phone outperforms the others in all bands / technologies but the variation between models can easily make the difference between no service and a reasonable service.

Well they have marked the S6 as good, but on here many people have complained about its poor performance receptionwise.

Not in my experience!

You must remember the sample size here is minuscule and so not anywhere near definitive. Three people might dislike a model and be extremely vocal about it creating an artificial 'noise'.

My issue with the blue tick testing is that it doesn't seem to be based on real-world usage. I remember seeing a video about it where it explained that all the tests were done in a lab.

Yes, it's annoying. My S5 does the same. I thought it was a fault that just mine did tbh, because showing the signal of another network is beyond stupid.

Yes for some reason Samsung phones show the emergency signal in place of the carrier signal. I am surprised they continue to do this as they've been getting complaints for years about it.

There's no arguing with the sample size on here; however the advanced knowledge on this forum / geek factor makes up for it to an extent

Speaking personally, I switched from an s6 to a g4 and couldn't believe the difference in terms of 4g coverage. When using the s6 I thought EE were grossly over exaggerating their 4g reach. With the g4, all of a sudden the maps are generally accurate, occasionally conservative.

It would be great to see reviwers pay more attention to the reception abilities of phones - for those living outside cities the ability to pull a signal can be critical to the user experience.

It's also a shame the networks aren't more up front about the relative merits of the models they sell, but I believe commercial sensitivity plays a part here- rightly or wrongly!