According to the net’s hardcore Apple geeks, the signal issues surrouding the iPhone 4’s antenna problem have appeared before, two years ago.

Back in 2008, Zdnet reported that the 2.0.1 iPhone firmware update fiddled with 3G and EDGE reception — or at least upped the number of bars displayed by the iPhone 3G. Without a time machine at hand, we can’t comment on whether the effect is precisely the same as what we’ll see when Apple releases its iPhone 4 software fix for the antenna issue, but it sounds eerily similar.

In its explanation of what’s happening with the iPhone 4 antenna issue — where signal drops when the bottom-left of the phone is held — Apple said the issue was one of the wrong signal level being displayed, rather there being as big a drop in signal as it seems —

“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.”

What’s disheartening about this is that it suggests we at Fonehome will only get about two bars of signal once the iPhone 4 update has been released, despite living in London in an area where we normally get a solid 4-5 bars of signal, regardless of which phone we use.

via Pocket-lint

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