I love all the replies complaining how it now shows less bars.
All this nonsense regarding bars must've started some time ago when a brilliant marketing person figured that if the phone was programmed to show 5 bars all the time, people would think the service was better. People compared that phone to other phones, even phones on other carriers, and came to the conclusion that their phone must be better because it had more bars. The saying goes one bad apple spoils the bushel, and now every phone on the market has the fudged bar system that shows 50% of signal range in that one bar. Even Android handsets do this, if you don't believe me check out the Anandtech article released today. The problem for Apple is that people now use these bars to compare different phones and different phones on different carriers. Unfortunately for them, this antenna issue has brought this system out in the open, and many seem to think that this issue is Apple only.
Apple has changed the fudged system with this update to have a more linear mapping to the bars so that each bar is roughly equal to 20% of the range of acceptable signal strength. Now ignorant people are flaming them because their phone has less bars that it used to and they think that that is bad. Anandtech showed that data and voice works just fine all the way from the best-case signal at -51 dBm all the way down to worst-case -121dBm. The only thing that a user can learn from looking at the bars on their phone is how close their phone is to losing a signal. The TWiT from two weeks ago with Jerry Pournelle and Spencer from antennasys really explained this well. Jerry even went as far to say that bars should be removed and be replaced with a

for having a signal and a

for not, as digital as it relates to cell phones is very binary; it either works or it doesn't.
It seems most tech people follow the spec sheet mentality. By this I mean that they assume that if the phone doesn't have a perfect signal it somehow is impaired. OMG MY PHONE DOESN'T show 5 bars!!1 There must be something wrong with it or the network! AT&T suxors! Wake up people, cell phones don't need to have a PERFECT signal in order to function properly! The 4.0 system may be fudged, but EVERY other phone uses a similar systme. The top 50% of the range of signal strength is all the same to the phone, why should it matter to the end user? Show them five bars, as the signal is just fine. Once it dips below 50% it tapers off, showing me that I am starting to get out of range of a tower, and may lose service. Thats fine. I know what it does, and it shows the end user that the signal is in the range in which the phone runs at 100%. Now with the 4.0.1 system many people will be confused for the sake of showing what the signal strength actually is because people were so outraged that Apple wasn't telling them EXACTLY what the signal strength is.
I feel bad for Apple that they had to do this, as now people ignorant of what bars really mean will think their phone is worse than it previously was, and they will think there is something wrong with their phone when they compare it to any of the other phones on the market that have this misleading system of bars. You can bet your bottom dollar no one else will switch to this more honest approach.