Is Apple covering up the real problem with its iPhone?
A couple of days ago Apple sent an open letter to iPhone 4 owners. The letter was in response to earlier reports of iPhone users having reception issues when holding the iPhone 4 the wrong way.
If you’re not familiar with the reception issues, Sam Diaz does a great job recapping the whole timeline. The crazy part about the latest round, though, is that instead of Apple admitting to a hardware flaw, the company is now saying that it has been misreporting signal strength since the original iPhone.
Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars.
So, what does all of this really mean? For starters, I can’t help but think that Apple was just caught doing something slimy. I remember when I was using the first generation iPhone and had reception issues in areas where my other phones were working great. At the time, Apple was blaming AT&T but my other AT&T phones were performing perfectly in that same area where I was dropping calls. Then Apple issued an update which fixed the reception issues, or so it claimed. It seemed that I had more bars “in more places”, but that I still didn’t have the solid coverage I should have been experiencing, given all of the bars I was seeing.
