Apple Inc. said its iPhones overstate wireless network signal strength and promised to fix the glitch in the coming weeks, Reuters reports. Its admission follows customer complaints about the design of its phone antenna. Apple apologized to customers in an open letter on July 2 and said it was “stunned to find that the formula” it uses to calculate network strength “is totally wrong” and that the error has existed since its first iPhone. Apple, which has sold iPhones since 2007, said it would update its software in coming weeks using a formula recommended by AT&T Inc., the exclusive U.S. provider for iPhone. “Users observing a drop of several bars 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,” according to the letter. The company already has had to apologize for delays in online orders of its iPhone 4 and for a supply shortage in its stores since the device hit shelves June 24…
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On new iPhone, a mystery of dropped calls
Apple’s touch-screen smart phone has been a sensation since Day 1 three years ago, and many who own the device believe it to be almost perfect—if only it worked better as a phone. That might be the case with the new iPhone 4 as well, reports the New York Times. What surprised many of the new phone’s earliest adopters as they tested the phone after its June 24 launch: The precious little bars that signal network connections inexplicably disappeared when they cradled the phone in their hands a particular way. Sometimes, but not always, the cradling resulted in dropped calls. In the hours before Apple weighed in on the problem, iPhone fans turned to one another on the internet in a zealous exercise in crowd-sourcing for answers to the mystery. They were all the more baffled because the iPhone 4 was designed to have better reception. A metal band that wraps around the edges of the device is supposed to pull in a stronger signal; software is supposed to choose the section of the signal with the least congestion. Late on June 24, an Apple spokesman, Steve Dowling, acknowledged that the issues experienced by users were real but played down their importance. “Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, depending on the placement of the antennas,” he said. “This is a fact of life for every wireless phone.”
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