Nik Rawlinson
How embarrassing. Apple got its sums wrong. Those bars on your iPhone screen aren’t as big as you thought they were… or at least they shouldn’t be.
For anyone who missed it, the company fessed up and sent out a missive admitting the algorithms it uses to measure signal strength on the iPhone (all models, mind you – not just the iPhone 4) were skewed in its favour to make it look like reception was better than it actually was. Like a sweating suspect who finds himself in Gene Hunt’s presence, you only need apply a firm hand in the right position and the iPhone admits it was lying all along. The promise of four bars is lost to the reality of two and you may as well wave your 3G speeds goodbye.
Apple’s metaphorical egg-wiping was close to comedic. ‘Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.’ Totally wrong. How fantastic an admission is that? Moreover, the ‘big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place’.
I know I shouldn’t mock, but this is very refreshing, don’t you think? I wish more companies would follow Apple’s lead in being so upfront about problems like this, presenting them as they are without all the unnecessary whitewash. Think how much better it would make them look, and how quickly we’d forget their past misdemeanours if they just held up their hands and admitted we’re not all perfect.
So how do you check what your reception actually is? You do exactly what Apple advised against, and grip your handset on several sides at once. The fact that this corrects the output of the erroneous algorithm has to be the biggest case of fault-as-feature the tech world has yet seen, and it’s rare that in those circumstances Apple is the culprit.
MacUser’s Alan Stonebridge has managed to reproduce the big bar problem, but I haven’t. Not at home, at least, where my first-generation iPhone could just about maintain one-bar reception in one particular room of the house when held by a window. I’m not joking. Everywhere else: radio silence. iPhone 4, on the other hand, gives me good coverage in every room on the very same network, so Apple’s claim that ‘the iPhone 4′s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped’ certainly rings true where I live.
Nonetheless, the company has offered to refund any and all iPhones returned in good condition within 30 days by anyone less than cock-a-hoop with the gadget, but I’d be more interested in seeing the company refund the many £25 ‘bumpers’ it sold before admitting where the problem really lay. This, it said, was the fix we needed. But it wasn’t. We just needed a software update, and that would be free.
