Apple: iPhone 4 Just Looks Like It’s Losing Signal
Apple this morning sent out a letter to iPhone users concerning the troubles that some iPhone 4 users have been concerning apparent signal disruptions, when the phone is held a a certain way. It insists that customers are generally reporting that reception on the iPhone 4 is better than on the iPhone 3GS. The glitch has come to be known as the “Death Grip“.
On the issue of how one holds the phone Apple says how you hold a phone affects the signal reception on any phone no matter its brand. Yet the whole tempest that has resulted from the tendency of the phone to display fewer bars when the user’s hand covers the black metal band near the iPhone’s lower left corner has become a persistent public relations irritant and has generated no fewer than three lawsuits.
Apple investigated. The result? The iPhone 4, it says, still has the best reception of any iPhone yet. The problem stems from software. And software is fortunately, easy to fix. Apple says the real problem is how the phone’s internal software displays the bars that indicate signal strength. For this they blame having used an incorrect formula to calculate how many bars should be displayed.
“Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength,” Appple writes. “For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.”
A fix is coming, the company says. Apple will now adopt AT&T’s recommended formula for figuring how many bars to display. The result, it says will be a more accurate display. The software upgrade will come for the iPhone 4 as well as the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G. Apple says to expect it, “within a few weeks.”
Byte of the Apple – BusinessWeek
Related posts: