Is that the only way to fix the antenna problem? It’s either that I have to hold the device in a certain way or to use a $29 Apple bumper accessory case to prevent the hand from touching the affected area. Apple is certainly sure that there isn’t a hardware problem and that it is only the result of the way people are holding their device.

On July 2nd Apple issued on its website a letter to concerned iPhone 4 customers. In the letter they claim that the drop in signal is only the result of a software malfunction in that the formula they use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong stating that ” their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.” To solve the problem Apple is going to issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. “Users observing a drop of several bars [which measures connection strength] 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,” Apple claims. “Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.”

On July 12th, Consumer Reports said it isn’t recommending iPhone 4 following tests confirming the handset has a hardware flaw that causes signal quality to degrade. They stated that “Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4’s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that “mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”

Why did this problem occur in the first place? Why are we always expecting to see flaws in any new product launched and find ourselves waiting for a software update or only buying the second patch? Apple products seem to perform best in their labs and not in the real world. Does Apple’s secrecy-based product development process prevent it from properly testing the products? Is Apple more concerned about marketing their events than producing a high quality product? I and many other iPhone 4 users have a lot of question for Steve Jobs, which I’m sure he’ll only reply to with a one liner “Nope. Just don’t hold it that way.”

Tags: apple, Consumer Reports, iPhone 4, steve jobs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.