iPhone 4 Update Sorta Kinda Addresses Signal Issue, a Little, But Not Quite

Having acknowledged the now-infamous iPhone 4 ‘death grip’, Apple has rushed an update out the door that… well, it doesn’t really solve the problem at all.

What the update does do is fix an apparent second problem that was displaying signal bars incorrectly. Apparently, your iPhone 4 has been lying to you, optimistically displaying four or five bars sometimes when it should be displaying one or two. Apple tells us it had something to do with the algorithm governing the definition of each level of strength.

Great. So, in a nutshell, this means that my hypothetical iPhone 4 can now more accurately inform me of its crappy signal, which is, apparently, happening more often than the device was previously displaying. At least Apple’s championing honesty.

As for the death grip, the official fix is still to just buy a bumper (which reportedly doesn’t work as well as Apple would hope) or, as Big Steve says, ‘hold it differently’. I’m gonna start holding phones upside down. Start a trend. It’ll be like playing on Expert Mode, and I just kind of have to guess what the other guy’s saying. ‘Sorry, Dave, I couldn’t make the funeral, I didn’t get your directions clearly. My phone was upside down.’ But my signal will be totally 4G, so whatever. Problem solved.