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Apple's Signal Strength Display Changes in iOS 4.0.1 and 4.1 Detailed

Before: < -113 dB = No service
After: -121dB to -113dB = One bar; < -121dB = No service.

If the software would prevent a call from being placed if "No service" is the reception status, then this software update will effectively improve reception for many people.

BOOM!
 
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Simsonic said:
Every single person that complains about the iP4 that has a reception or screen problem with it is a MORON if they have not taken it back, refunded your money, or gotten a working phone.

My guess is that most of us are happy with our new iPhones. My family has four of them. They all work perfectly. BTW I am convinced that all the bad press is because Google is paying a few people to post bad pub about the phone and your all a bunch of sheep.
Click to expand...

In the uk, in certain situations you are locked into a lenghy 2 year or 18 month contract once you use your phone.

What would you have those people do who are left with up to 2 years of service to pay for?

it isn't as easy as you think to "return it" for everyone.
 
Personally I've never really looked at how many bars I've had unless I went to use my phone and it didn't work. While on a conversation on the handset you can't see them... and if I'm not on the phone I really don't care as long as my phone rings and I can pick it up and talk. I guess I have a self made ignorance but figure my phone will either do "stuff" or not in a given area and me knowing how many bars are displaying really doesn't mean much. Heck, I've had my phone not work when it showed I had full signal strength on many occasions.
 
Signal strength does not correlate linearly to call quality. While the new bars are more accurate for measuring signal strength, they are less accurate for determining data error rates. The old system was better for predicting the actual quality of your call.

old rating
5 - Very good sound quality and data speeds
4 - Good sound quality and data speeds
3 - Fair sound quality and data speeds
2 - Poor sound quality and data speeds
1 - Your calls is gunna drop

new rating
5 - Very good sound quality and data speeds
4 - Very good sound quality and data speeds
3 - Good to very good sound quality and data speeds
2 - Poor to good sound quality and data speeds
1 - Your calls is gunna drop
 
There is no right or wrong way to display signal bars. It is nothing more than opinion as to one being better than the other. I think it would be cool if Apple were to give us the option to choose the system we want to use. I would pick a "normalized" scale from 0 to 100 (I would prefer 00 to FF). Others might like DB or a color coded block from red to blue. How about color coded normalized numbers from 00 to FF?
 
ChazUK said:
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In the uk, in certain situations you are locked into a lenghy 2 year or 18 month contract once you use your phone.

What would you have those people do who are left with up to 2 years of service to pay for?

it isn't as easy as you think to "return it" for everyone.
Click to expand...

Indeed, and also you have just cancelled your old contract and sold you old phone.
 
Us

ChazUK said:
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In the uk, in certain situations you are locked into a lenghy 2 year or 18 month contract once you use your phone.

What would you have those people do who are left with up to 2 years of service to pay for?

it isn't as easy as you think to "return it" for everyone.
Click to expand...

In the US we can return our phone no questions asked. If we keep them we are locked in, but that is a choice. I just don't believe people should complain so loudly when they can choose a different product. Go get a pos Android device and leave us alone. I just do not believe all the negative publicity. I think we are being fed lies and the media has jumped all over bs as usual.
 
Simsonic said:
Every single person that complains about the iP4 that has a reception or screen problem with it is a MORON if they have not taken it back, refunded your money, or gotten a working phone.

My guess is that most of us are happy with our new iPhones. My family has four of them. They all work perfectly. BTW I am convinced that all the bad press is because Google is paying a few people to post bad pub about the phone and your all a bunch of sheep.
Click to expand...

In real life, things aren't quite as simple as they are in your 3rd grade class. When you grow up you'll learn about cost benefit analysis, contracts and how subsidization in the future may or may not easily work after returning an iPhone 4 for something else.
 
ChazUK said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-gb; Nexus One Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1)



In the uk, in certain situations you are locked into a lenghy 2 year or 18 month contract once you use your phone.

What would you have those people do who are left with up to 2 years of service to pay for?

it isn't as easy as you think to "return it" for everyone.
Click to expand...

Move to America, return your phone, move back.
 
-119 db

VenusianSky said:
So they increased the dB range for one bar. So before, if I got -119 dB, for example, it just went to No Signal. But now, I will have signal at -119dB. Is that correct?
Click to expand...

No. If you had -119 db before you would have had a signal, but wouldn't see a bar displayed. Now you will still have a signal, but now a bar will display.

Simple!
 
longofest said:
So in comes the conundrum of what apple's UI designers were facing. As humans, we think in very linear terms. 50 is half of 100, etc.

However, decibels is a logarithmic unit and therefore the signal strength is on a logarithmic scale. -20db is not twice as good of signal strength as -40db. That is one of the reasons why phone UI designers use bars and don't translate the strength into any kind of number.
Click to expand...

You see that makes sense to you. That makes sense to developers. That makes sense to math majors. But the average American could not even spell logarithmic and really doesn't care about any of that.

The point is, Apple could do it on a 1-100. I'm not saying that if -121 were 1 then -111 would be 10, but how about Apple does the math and converts the numbers to a scale that makes it simple.
 
Today Show

Outside the Pasadena Apple store I was interviewed by representatives of the Today Show. Specifically, they wanted to talk to me about my overall experience with the iPhone and my reaction to a "Recall Announcement" tomorrow. The producer suggested that the purpose of the press conference was to announce "whether there would be a recall or not". Clearly Apple has not indicated that this is the nature of the press conference, so this represents another example of the media fanning the flames of the issue.

On camera I attempted to frame the issue in more objective terms (i.e., the AnandTech analysis) and suggested that the media (in general) was oversimplifying the issue and poorly educating consumers and investors. While not overt, it was clear that they were much more interested in examples of dramatically poor reception or dropped phone calls which has not been my experience at all. To their credit they captured 3-5 minutes of discussion about the issues and seemed interested in my description of bars to represent signal strength and how its inherently misleading. I also reflected on the phone's ability to hold calls in low-signal areas that my original iPhone could not.

I did express my opinion that Apple does have a design issue with signal attenuation when held a certain way without a case or bumper. Since the effect is greater than most phones, Apple should make some effort to address the issue with a fix to new phones and subsidize the purchase of bumpers or cases for existing customers.
 
JPark said:
They're gonna get a ton of complaints from people who's reception "just got worse all the sudden." Just like those folks who complain that their plants are dying because of the 1 hour less sunlight when we switch to Daylight Savings Time.
Click to expand...

actually... at&t's going to get those complaints. kind of adds a new dimension to at&t's historic cell phone reception issues
 
mingoglia said:
Personally I've never really looked at how many bars I've had unless I went to use my phone and it didn't work. While on a conversation on the handset you can't see them... and if I'm not on the phone I really don't care as long as my phone rings and I can pick it up and talk. I guess I have a self made ignorance but figure my phone will either do "stuff" or not in a given area and me knowing how many bars are displaying really doesn't mean much. Heck, I've had my phone not work when it showed I had full signal strength on many occasions.
Click to expand...

Your right on that, I don't even look at the reception most of the time. I glance at it here and there but I don't pay attention. I know that I not going to lose signal in the greater and outer area of Orlando, FL. It at times when I and traveling that I check more often, but then again, some people are different.
 
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Simsonic said:
ChazUK said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-gb; Nexus One Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1)



In the uk, in certain situations you are locked into a lenghy 2 year or 18 month contract once you use your phone.

What would you have those people do who are left with up to 2 years of service to pay for?

it isn't as easy as you think to "return it" for everyone.
Click to expand...

In the US we can return our phone no questions asked. If we keep them we are locked in, but that is a choice. I just don't believe people should complain so loudly when they can choose a different product. Go get a pos Android device and leave us alone. I just do not believe all the negative publicity. I think we are being fed lies and the media has jumped all over bs as usual.
Click to expand...

Great for you. What about Brits who have to now fork out hundreds of pounds on outstanding line rental fees or a 2nd sim free handset? More info:https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/10521935/

What's with all the Android paranoia too?
 
Honest

This way of showing us our reception is honest and true. The old one was just strange. The only thing is: Death grip is gripping on us still.;)
 
zxcvb said:
if bar display is the only change of new IOS , it's not worth time to do the update.
Click to expand...

These kind of statements get dry really fast.

It's _possible_ that the revised software will allow the phone the hold onto a call or data transfer at the lower end of the spectrum when before it _thought_ that the signal was too weak. Give enough time for people to witness this in the real world before drawing conclusions.
 
I have the perfect solution. Use the GPS in the phone to determine how high the user is holding the phone. The higher the phone, the more bars. It could be fun watching people standing on chairs and stuff.

You could also use the accelerometer and the gyroscope to keep track of how much people are moving the phone. More movement, more bars. This could help Americans lose some weight.
 
reckless2k2 said:
Hhhhmmm....I don't think AT&T is going to be too happy about this. It totally seems like they are loosing the deal.
Click to expand...

"To address the issue, Apple will be issuing a software update "within a few weeks" that will adjust how signal strength bars are calculated and displayed. The change will adopt a recently recommended formula from AT&T that will more accurately display actual signal strength at any given time."
 
Does anyone know if Apple has changed the sample rate? I understand the signal level is quite slow to change. If they sped this up a bit, people might feel it was more honest.
 
iJesus said:
If Apple truly did use different formula's to cover up AT&T's bad coverage, there's certainly a legal issue in the works.
Click to expand...

I don't think there will be any basis for legal action. The bars are a measure of how well the phone manufacturer feels the signal strength is with respect to the phone's ability to make a phone call. There is no industry standard for these and every manufacturer is different. The fact that the phone won't drop into "no signal" mode until it hits -121 is an indication that the phone can hold a phone call at that low level of signal strength. Although, some of us have had phone calls drop with 5 bars displayed (usually meaning a tower issue).
 
How do you all forget so soon??

When the 3G came out and people complained about its poor reception and never getting any bars, Apple jacked up the bars displayed for the corresponding strengths so instead of showing 2-3 bars normally it would show max.

Now they have this new issue and they put it back to where it should be and pretty much was. Some of you really amaze me with your selective memory.

iPhone Firmware 2.1
Released: Sept. 12, 2008
Added:

Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls
Significantly better battery life for most users
Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
Faster installation of 3rd party applications
Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications
Improved performance in text messaging
Faster loading and searching of contacts
Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
Genius playlist creation
 
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