About those "bars"
Apple Acknowledges Flaw in iPhone Signal Meter
Excerpts:
Apple Inc. said Friday that it was ''stunned'' to find that its iPhones have for years been using a ''totally wrong'' formula to determine how many bars of signal strength they are getting.
Apple said that's the reason behind widespread complaints from users that the latest model, iPhone 4, can show a sudden plunge in signal strength when they hold it in a way that covers a small black strip on one edge of the phone. Users online have jokingly called this the ''death grip'' for the phone.
That drop seems exaggerated because the phone can wrongly display four or five bars of signal strength when it shouldn't, Apple said.
''Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place,'' the company said in a letter to users.
.... It maintains that iPhone 4's wireless performance is better than previous models. And it said the incorrect signal-strength formula existed in the original iPhone, launched in 2007.
....
''We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see,'' Apple said.
Comment: Hard to believe .... "incorrect signal-strength formula ... [since] ... 2007"
Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4:
ReplyDelete"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. 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. "