Well, that was short-lived. Apple has removed all of the “death grip” videos from their website, which showed in gory detail how competing models from companies such as Motorola, RIM and HTC also exhibited the same signal attenuation problems as the iPhone 4 when held a certain way.

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple has removed their competitors’ “death grip” videos from the website over the weekend, although a single page remains which demonstrates Apple’s antenna design and test labs and explains a bit about the challenge of designing cell phones. Apple claims they have invested more than $100 million into their state-of-the-art testing lab, which features 17 different anechoic chambers used to measure antenna and wireless performance.

When the antenna section of Apple’s website first launched a short time ago, the company went to great lengths to show competing handsets which exhibited the same kind of “death grip” issue as the iPhone 4. Popular models included Research in Motion’s Blackberry Bold 9700, HTC’s Droid Eris, Samsung’s Windows Mobile Omnia II, Nokia’s N97 and the more recently added Motorola Droid X.

In fairness, Apple also showed the same issue on both the new iPhone 4 as well as last year’s iPhone 3GS -- but that didn’t stop competing smartphone makers from crying foul about their products being used to demonstrate a potentially negative aspect of modern cell phones.

While the “death grip” videos have been removed from Apple’s website, they remain live on the company’s YouTube channel at the time of this writing.

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