While the Apple iPhone 4 sales have been even stronger than Apple themselves expected, the launch has not been without a list of issues. Many people have been reporting signal problems since the Phone was released and Apple initially said it was down to' how people were holding the phone'. Late last week however Apple have apparently located the root of the problem.
Apple sent this open letter to their users on Friday “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.”
Apple have said that the problem is actually down to the iPhone showing more bars than it should, quite often two higher than reception is delivering. This means they actually had a weak signal to begin with.
Not surprisingly analysts have been hostile in their response to this claim with Tina Teng, analyst at ISuppli Corp saying “I'm still in awe that it took them four generations [of iPhones] to figure this out, they're not giving consumers a satisfactory answer. It still goes back to how you hold it.”
Apple have announced they are releasing a software update in the next couple of weeks to ‘fix' the signal overreading issue. This patch will also apply to the older 3G and 3GS phones in the range.
KitGuru says: We still find it hard to believe it took them all this time to find out such a serious issue.
The whole thing is fishy. I dont know how they could have missed something so obvious for years and years.