Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4 | via Apple.com
Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. 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. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.?
Seems to be a bit of a goofy response, “You’re not getting worse reception, we’re just displaying the wrong number of bars,” especially considering that there is some empirical, albeit not necessarily scientific evidence that holding the phone “wrong” does reduce download speeds. But, reduced download speeds aside, as stated in the above linked article:
Holding the iPhone 4 in my hand drops the 3G download speed by about a third, but it’s still faster than the 3GS. Upload speed and latency didn’t seem affected by holding it in my hand.?
Note: even at reduced speeds the iPhone 4 is still faster than the 3GS.
Perception, of course, is not always reality…