Apple on iPhone 4 reception. It s better then fine. We only had a bad bar calculation formula

The reception issues on iPhone 4, and advice on how “to carry it the correct way”, has become the joke of the week around internet.

Almost every competitor with  a grudge against iPhone needed to chime in with their very own version of “you can hold our device anyway you like and it still works” quip.

Looks like Apple is feeling the warmth, and now they decided to deal with  issue head on. Their conclusions?

Reception on iPhone 4 is only fine. Every phone gets weaker reception, when you hold it the certain way  But we had a wrong formula to calculate the variety of bars indicating signal strengths. we actually used this faulty formula for the last 2 years, in iPhone 3G and threeGs too. we are engaged on a brand new formula for a better firmware update. As soon because it’s out, the issues will depart and you’ll have the ability to hold your iPhone anyway you want… If there’s enough signal, that is…

Here’s the relevant a part of the clicking release:

Upon investigation, we were stunned in finding that the formula we use to calculate what number of bars of signal strength to display is completely wrong. Our formula, in lots of instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it’s going to for a given signal strength. as an example, we sometimes display 4 bars once we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars once they grip their iPhone in a definite way are obviously in a neighborhood with very weak signal strength, however they don’t understand it because we’re erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the 1st place.

To fix this, we’re adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating what number of bars to display for a given signal strength. the genuine signal strength remains a similar, but the iPhone’s bars will report it much more accurately, providing users a miles better indication of the reception they’re going to get in a given area. we are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a piece taller so that they shall be easier to work out.

It actually correlates quite well with the detailed analysis of iPhone 4 reception issues the AnandTech did.

But it still doesn’t address the the issue of the shortcoming of insulating coating on external antenna, that is the first cause of the difficulty, and why bumper cases fix the problem at the moment.

Let’s hope Apple at least quietly adds a thin insulator layer within the next iPhone 4 production runs.