Pro-ID

The iPhone 4 has received it's fair share of criticism (and lawsuits?) due to a design flaw where holding the phone a certain way causes dropped calls and lowered reception strength. Yesterday Steve Jobs supposedly said,"We're working on it..." and today, the "Death Grip" problem is being acknowledged on Apple's site as a "software calculation error."

Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. 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.

Apple goes on to say they used the same formula for past iPhones, but it's only noticeable now because of the new antenna.

Already have an iPhone 4 and want to reduce your Death Grip? You're not alone. People around the web have been hard at work: some havepainted clear nail polish around the phone, others have wrapped tape on the corners, a few have used Sugru, while the most audacious have taken a knife to the ports and modified their SIM cards. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures, but you could just buy a case.

Core77