Thaindian News

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA (BNO NEWS) — Apple on Friday said it was ’stunned’ to find a mistake that caused a recent outburst of complaints about the iPhone 4, but says the problem had always been there.

The California-based company released an open letter to iPhone 4 users on its website to address the complaints, which have dominated media coverage of the phone in the past few days.

Many users had complained about poor call reception when the phone was held in a certain way, and some have even filed lawsuits against Apple in response.

“We were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” Apple said in the open letter. “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.”

Apple said that users who observe 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 don’t know that because the phone is erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. “Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.”

But interestingly, Apple says the problem is not new at all. The company said the mistake has been present since the original iPhone, although there were never so many complaints about poor reception.

To address the issue, Apple says it will adopt AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. “The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area,” the company said.

Apple said it will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. And since the mistake was there since the original iPhone, the software will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.

But despite the complaints, Apple says it sold more than 1.7 million of its iPhone 4 in the first three days. That makes it Apple’s most successful product launch in history.