Apple's iPhone 4 Bar Dropping Explanation

     So Apple has put out a press release stating that it's aware of the perceived issues with iPhone 4 reception, and that's all it is - a perception issue.  Albeit one that Apple themselves created.  The actual iPhone 4 is apparently getting better reception than any previous iPhone and people should stop with the complaining.

     Apple are going to issue a software update, but it's not an actual "fix" for the problems that people have been seeing, it'll just mean that the number of signal strength bars displayed on the Apple phones reflects more accurately the actual signal strength that people are getting.  You'd think there'd be a standard for that, but apparently not.

     Personally, I don't think there was anything "accidental" about the original way that Apple worked out it's signal strength to bar ratio.  It's a little disingenuous for them to be saying they just did it accidentally.  I think it's certainly possible that there were some bad marketing decisions made though.

     There are a two main ways I can see the iPhone shipping with an over optimistic indicator of signal strength.

• Apple studied how to set the number of bars relative to signal strength.  They looked at other phones on the market and realised that as long as you had (for example) 3 or more bars, the majority of people were perfectly happy with their call quality and data transmission rates.  Rather than annoying people by showing them a less than adequate looking number of bars, they just simplified things and made 5 bars on the iPhone equal to 3 bars on most others.  I could see Apple doing this, it seems very much the way they design products - removing complexity where it doesn't add any benefit.
• The other possible reason is more tied to the iPhone situation in America.  With the phone locked into a single carrier, and not necessarily the best carrier for coverage, maybe there was a little pressure from AT&T to artificially inflate the perception of reception.

     Whatever the reason, it's easy to see why Apple would want to backpedal on this now.  Why would they want to make the iPhone seem like it's got issues with its call quality, when it's really at least as much to do with the service provider not having enough coverage?  Well, maybe in America with one carrier there is a reason to share the pain with the AT&T - you don't want the customer to think that by buying an iPhone they're locking themselves into patchy coverage as well.

     I've seen many reports on each generation of the iPhone saying that it's a great device, but a pretty ordinary phone.  My personal experience is that it's a pretty good phone too.  I'll be interested to see if the opinion of the iPhone's general call quality improves once Apple rolls out the update and the number of bars more accurately reflects the signal strength people are receiving.  You'd think that people should be expecting slightly lower performance once they realise they don't have perfect reception.

     I'm curious to see how many bars I drop on my 3GS.  There's definitely some locations I'm at regularly where I've been very surprised to be getting a solid 5 bars, but a 20m shift will drop those 5 bars back to 1.