A recent article on Crunchgear has reported that Apple has released a statement finally acknowledging the signal issue with the iPhone 4. For those unaware, many iPhone 4 owners have reported signal loss and dropped phone calls if they hold the phone in a certain way (in a way most people hold the phone to make calls). Apple is claiming that the signal loss has nothing to do with the antenna but rather with how the phone reports the signal strength in the form of bars on the phone.

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. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. 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. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

At best case scenario, Apple is saying that they’ve been lying to us about the quality signal that the iPhone receives. If that were the case, then why would people’s calls get dropped when they hold a phone a certain way? If the problem was simply a visual representation of signal, then how come the signal (i.e. dropped calls) is actually affected by holding the phone in this way?

This is a pathetic attempt to calm people down and I’m not buying it.