Note, if you read Apple’s letter carefully, you’ll notice that the solution Apple is proposing won’t actually change anything about the way the iPhone actually handles phone calls. If you have this issue, and you grip your phone the same way you do now, you are still going to have a negative impact on your antennae, just as you do on every other phone. However, because your phone will now report fewer bars in the first place in those areas where you are likely to drop a call, your signal will appear to you to only drop from say, two bars to one, as opposed to five bars to one, thus giving you the impression when the call drops that the signal loss wasn’t so drastic, and you never really had a good signal, anyway.
Which is actually true, and it’s what many more informed people have been trying to point out for over a week now.
Like I said last week, “bars” are a completely arbitrary thing on a cell phone. Apple is simply going to recalibrate the bars to make the signal loss look less drastic, which is fine, because the signal loss is less drastic than it now appears.
The sad part is, this “solution” will actually solve Apple’s problem. People will buy it, just as they’ve bought into the “death grip” hype.
Immediately, the headlines have shifted to positive language. “Apple will address the reception issue with a software fix.” The media, too lazy to figure out what’s actually going on, reports on the fix, and users follow along like sheep. Everything goes back to normal.
Questions like “Why was Apple using a rigged method of showing higher bars than they should have in the first place?” are unlikely to get asked by many. If you believe Apple when it tells you that it was “shocked” to find this “miscalculation”, you’re more of a fanboy than I am.
Was Apple trying to cover up the fact that AT&T’s network isn’t so great, or were they covering up the fact that all iPhones weren’t really getting very good reception? My guess is the latter. Apple is fairly new to the whole designing phones thing, after all. Stands to reason that the first few models weren’t exactly ideal, perfect performers in this arena.
Personally, I’m happy to see this change, anyway, even though the “death grip” hasn’t effected me at all. I’m tired of my phone lying to me, telling me I have five bars of signal when I can’t even get a web page to download or make a simple call. The “bars” are never going to be accurate, but it will be nice to see them be slightly more accurate than they are now.
