The iPhone 4 could definitely be called the gadget of the year. After purchasing an older iPhone, most users couldn’t really settle for any other phone, and were anxiously awaiting the new model. Since the number of iPhone users has grown by a lot, needless to say a lot of people couldn’t wait to get their hands on the new iPhone 4. Apple was well aware of that and apparently in hurry to release it to the market. As a result they seem to have studied their new iPhone a bit less than they ought to. Especially since the design of the antenna for this particular device was one that no other company has used in a mobile phone until now. At the time of the release, this was one of the main reasons to praise the iPhone 4. As of now, it seems to have turned into a problem. As it turns out, the iPhone 4 isn’t as close to perfect as we’ve gotten other Apple accustomed to discover products are. Far from it actually, as a lawsuit against the company was to prove. After many users claimed that they had reception issues, especially if they held their iPhone 4 in a certain way, Apple announced that it would be issuing a free software update that was supposed to fix the reception problem.
According to the company the problem wasn’t hardware related. What was causing the problem was the formula used to calculate how many bars of signal strength should be displayed. Apple even explained in a letter how the formula used for the iPhone 4 seems to often display 4 bars of signal when it should be displaying only 2 bars in an area with weak signal. Apple also warned users that they are may be holding the phone ‘wrong’. According to the company holding any phone more tightly will lead to slightly lower reception. Apple does however admit that for most phones, a maximum of one bar of signal can be reduced in that situation, while for the iPhone 4, a far bigger drop, of four or five bars seems to happen. This happened especially if it was held in the left hand.
Well, the incoming software update doesn’t seem to fix the transmission and reception issues. According to Gizmodo, three calls to AppleCare rendered the exact same answers and solutions. Apparently the incoming software update will not fix the antenna problem (wait, so it really is an antenna problem, isn’t it?), but only make the display of signal accurate. What you can do to avoid problems is: Avoid touching the phone’s dead spot, on the bottom left corner or buy yourself a case for the phone. In this case, Apple’s software update doesn’t really help with anything and the company does seem to owe its users a free case to solve the problem. You can find a petition for that, hosted by Gizmodo here.
