Jul 02
Apple today said that reported iPhone 4 reception problems are caused by an error in the way the phone displays bars of signal strength.
“We were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” Apple said in a statement posted on the company’s Web site “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.”
This means that many users are seeing full bars in weak signal areas. Because the bar display is highly compressed towards the weak signal side of the spectrum, bars don’t change at all between good and moderate signal, but then change very, very quickly with slight differences in weak signal.
The tech site AnandTech went into more detail recently on the iPhone 4’s “compressed, optimistic” range of display bars. According to AnandTech, “over half of the range of possible signal levels in dBm (from -99 dBm to -51 dBm) is reported as 5 bars.”
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