Apple on Friday said that a reported reception problem with the iPhone 4 is being 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 recently went into more detail 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."
Apple will fix the bar display issue, which affects all iPhones since the original iPhone, with a free software update within a few weeks, the company said.
While Apple concedes that they have a problem with signal display, they still insist that "iPhone 4 reception is better than the iPhone 3GS."
The dramatic quality of the iPhone "death grip" came from the large drop in inappropriately displayed bars, according to Apple.
Apple did not directly address reports that holding the phone in a certain way may cause it to drop calls or get dramatically slower data speeds, which would be unrelated to bar display. The company continued to repeat that "death grips" which reduce reception are possible on many phones.
"Gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones," the company said.
Originally posted to Gearlog.