Heres my two cents:

I've lived in Montana for the last 4 years, working for a Verizon retailer the entire time. Our biggest struggle out here is reception, as I'm sure you can imagine. So Motorola has always been our "Go To" phone for reception. I actually asked one of the Moto Venders a while back as to why Moto tends to have the best reception. His answer was that most the hardware on our Switch is Motorola made, so they work together seamlessly. I don’t understand how it would make any difference, but hey, I'm no engineer. I just sell the phones and learn whatever I can about them.

Now in saying all that, we have recently come across something interesting (In the past year). HTC has been running a part of its antenna to the back door of the phone, behind all the hardware and battery. I haven’t seen any definitive evidence that this technique actually improves reception in real world applications, but I found it interesting enough to share

-SG