As pertains to cell phones, of course, not local watering holes.

The little bars on your cell phone are an indication of signal STRENGTH, which doesn’t really give you enough information to judge much of anything. In addition to strength, there’s also signal quality, which can have as much, if not more, effect on your ability to keep a call going. The indicator on all cell phones, in addition, is not updated every second, but rather is polled at a given interval. Five seconds, fifteen seconds, thirty seconds. Whatever the case may be.

Ever look at your phone as you try to make a call, and notice that it has full bars, yet the call won’t go through? Chances are, you have a strong, but lo-quality signal. Or you don’t have a signal at all, and the indicator hasn’t been updated yet.

Or you look at your phone, and even though you’re not moving, it suddenly jumps from four bars to one? That doesn’t mean the signal cut out at that exact moment. It was probably gone a long time ago.

There are several places in San Francisco I can go where my phone will consistently show a full set of bars, but I can’t complete a call or get any data from the 3G network. There are other places where I have less than a bar and can stay on the phone with no issues.

Even if you take two equal phones and place them right next to each other, you’ll often get two different levels of “bars.”

My point is that “bars” are very, very unscientific. And yet most people, tech press included, treat a cell phone’s bars like they are a highly calibrated precision instrument.

Stop that.

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve heard a lot today about the new iPhone and whether or not it gets a better signal than the old iPhone. Many reviewers suggested that they had fewer dropped calls, and in general found their service had improved. Others mentioned that their phone had fewer “bars” than before, and therefore the new iPhone had poorer reception.

There’s no easy way to determine whether one phone gets better or worse signal in general than another, other than to make calls with it and track how well it performs in the real world over time.

Stop obsessing over “bars” and start dialing.

I’ve been hearing a lot of people, particularly in the comment sections of tech news sights, complaining that they didn’t really need multitasking, and that they’re now spending all their time “killing” apps in the popup dock in order to conserve battery life.

Hate to break it to you, but Apple’s implementation here isn’t hurting your battery life. Think of those apps down there as a “recents” list, not a “currently running” list. Because unless those apps are specifically running one of the new background services (like audio playback, etc.) they aren’t “running.” They are temporarily frozen in RAM, but they are not eating processor cycles, slowing down your phone, hurting your battery, etc. In fact, any app that hasn’t been recompiled specifically for iOS4 isn’t even frozen in RAM. You don’t need to kill any of those apps, because your iPhone will kill them for you as needed. That’s the whole reason why we waited this long for Apple to implement this solution.

The only reason to “kill” one of those apps is if you specifically need it to reset itself for some reason, or if you don’t want someone else to know what you’ve been running lately. Otherwise, leave that drawer alone; the device will take care of everything for you.