The iPhone4 was release a week or so ago and has brought Apple a lot of money and a lot of problems with the phones reception. Apple has said that they are coming out with a fix iOS 4.0.1 which is not really a fix for the reception it is more of a fix for the bars. The bars are like the cake it’s a lie. Here is what Apple had to say about the problems:
“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.
To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.”
You can read the whole letter at Apples site here. What theses 2 paragraphs are saying is that the iPhone bars have been lying to us this whole time, and that there fix is going to make it tell the truth as to how many bars it really has. I feel as if Apple took a gamble on the iPhone4. They had to have known the problems with the phone before it came out, but they decided to not delay it. This gamble just will not pay off for Apple in the long run.
The Droid X will be coming out next Thursday and as long as the Droid X doesn’t have the reception problems of the iPhone 4 it should be another good Android phone that can be added to the long list of Android phones. Android has been gaining momentum now for a while and these issues with the iPhone4 will help Android gain even more momentum.
It will be like Vista there was a few little problems that only affected businesses for most people Vista would have been fine. But Apple ran the Mac VS PC ads and got people to Switch to Mac or in some cases got them to just not upgrade to Vista.
Google might be able to do the same to the iPhone. There many people reading and seeing these issues with the iPhone this may scare them off. They might instead just sick with their phone or they might get some other type of smart phone. Either way if Apple wants to stop with shift they better pull a rabbit out of there hat soon.