  The ongoing commercial deployment of millimeter wave systems brings into
focus a number of practical issues in form factor user equipment (UE) design.
With wavelengths becoming smaller, antenna gain patterns becoming directional,
and link budgets critically dependent on beamforming, it becomes imperative to
use a number of antenna modules at different locations of the UE for good
performance. While more antennas/modules can enhance beamforming array gains,
it comes with the tradeoff of higher component cost, power consumption of the
associated radio frequency circuitry, and a beam management overhead in
learning the appropriate beam weights. Thus, the goal of a good UE design is to
provide robust spherical coverage corresponding to good array gains over the
entire sphere around the UE with a low beam management overhead, complexity,
and cost. The scope of this paper is to study the implications of two popular
commercial millimeter wave UE designs (a face and an edge design) on spherical
coverage. We show that analog beam codebooks can result in good performance for
both the designs, and the edge design provides a better tradeoff in terms of
robust performance (with hand blockage), beam management overhead,
implementation complexity from an antenna placement standpoint and cost.
