You may remember we reported on an issue that several users are reporting a loss in signal when holding the iPhone 4 a certain way. Well Apple firstly said just don’t hold it that way, but it looks like they’ve done some investigation into it.

And surprisingly they’ve discovered that there is a flaw in the way the the signal strength is displayed.

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

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.

So there’s something we didn’t think about, but it also proves that holding the iPhone 4 a certain way does in fact affect the signal.

So what are Apple going to do about it? Well there going to release a software update in the coming weeks which fixes this and make bars 1, 2, 3 easier to see. Since this issue has apparently been around since the original iPhone, the update will also be coming to the iPhone 3g and 3gs

Related posts:

1. iOS 4.0.1 Update Now Live – Fixes Display Problem
2. iPhone 4 Signal Issue Not An Issue
3. iPhone 4 Signal Issue Could Be Fixed With Software Update?
4. iPhone 4 Not Recommended By Consumer Report
5. iPhone 4 Recall Would Cost $1.5 Billion