[Nexus 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] skezza:
Because some people think they are super-clever by writing articles that are based on absolutely nothing. Their main premise was the use of the terminals on the backplate.

The backplate does have terminals for various antenna based features in the form of spring fingers (heard them called spring trees too), these are common in modern electrical devices. WiFi, GPS, etc, these spring fingers are required to achieve best possible performance.

People (including some guys from xda, probably have an iPhone in their back pocket) jumped on this and called it a cut-corner in design and cheap and that there was potential for this to manifest into a problem if the case warps or is removed, and thus their connection will be broken. Basically, individuals trying to write articles predicting the future, to look clever "hey look, this might fail if this happens, look, we're like engineers predicting when a bridge might collapse" or "hey look, if the brakes fail on this car, it might crash, aren't I ****ing smart" :victory: Those who contributed to that particular article all now have honorary degrees in 'Stating the Obvious' from DeVry institute.

What I reminded them repeatedly is that almost all modern phones use this design (and have been for years) as it's the only way to maximize reception without using wires which are dangerous in an enclosed shell that might be disassembled one day or alternatively, having a physical stork sticking out of the top of your phone like one from 20 years ago. I guess it's possible to pad one side of the case but it's proved ever so difficult for many companies. Of course, with any spring finger if the connection is slightly reduced, the fix is simple, slightly increase the height of the spring. Use a thin piece of plastic and raise the height slightly, not much, then the connection will be perfect again.

Samsungs use spring fingers on their Galaxy models :

S3:

Top right of the circuit board (just below the top right actually), there are two spring fingers, one above the other. Bottom right of the shell, you can see the terminals they connect too.

S1:

Just underneath to the left of the camera is a single spring finger.

Remember the GPS fix for S1? It was to push against the top left of the case, put a piece of blu tac or something, yes, all you were doing was pressing against the spring finger.

Apple use them in the iPhone 5 for the new LTE antenna from what I saw of a disassembled one in our office, I actually couldn't find a good picture of a teardown on Google, they were all from distance.( I guess the users were too busy jizzing over it and were scared it would show stains)

Plus many other manufacturers use them.

I'm not saying they are a perfect solution but my point is they are used everywhere, so it was a total non-article. Why don't XDA do a thread over design faults for every phone, if they did, this would come up every bloody week because pretty much every phone has them.

It was a none story, but great for iPhone fanboiz reading it.

It was basically the equivalent of saying "hey, we have a car, but the biggest design fault of this particular car, is that the engine is made of metal and metal wears out over time"... genius