It probably didn't help that AT&T service was poor during this time, as they were the only iPhone carrier in the US, their backend was quite unreliable as everyone was discovering streaming video.
All my iPhones, not just the 4, regularly dropped calls with AT&T until I switched to Verizon.
This wasn't a non issue. You touched the phone in the wrong places and you would drop off an existing call.
Most people solved this by indeed not "holding it wrong" or getting cases (I don't know if the cases worked, but there was a whole industry built around advertising cases that solved this problem).
Only if you define UX as including all the really hard stuff that goes into engineering the device, and not just the externalities. A car that looks nice but doesn't go isn't as important as a car that goes but doesn't look nice.
Because the people doing UX are generally just UI people who want to claim credit for all the hard stuff as well. So they have no ability to change any of the experience other than redesigning the cosmetics.
I remember this episode but not the details. Why was it a non-issue if holding the phone did cause the signal strength to drop? Is it just the case that the drop was too small to affect call quality/stability?
That's exactly the opposite of what the post says. It says that holding the phone wrong caused the signal strength to drop precipitously, but the UI still showed that the signal was strong.
Author of this thread here, thanks for sharing! This was the first time I publicly went into assembly code so I was a little nervous about screwing up a detail but glad it’s getting a warm reception.
To TFA's point - "Bars" are relative and relatively meaningless - [SS]RSRP, RSRQ and SINR are your real numeric signal strength / quality measurements.
Not sure about Apple, but on Android, individual carriers can set the number-to-bars thresholds. Two otherwise-identical signals could be represented as a different number of bars depending on your particular carrier: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/signal-strength
1. I seriously doubt Apple was accidentally displaying more bars on the phone. If it was a "bars" issue then it was almost certainly done deliberately to make the iPhone reception look better than what it was.
2. It wasn't just bars. I had this phone and you would literally drop off calls by holding the phone differently when you hadn't done anything else. There was a genuine problem with the phone that I don't think was ever resolved other than people getting used to holding the phone differently like Steve Jobs told us to.
I lost my iPhone and switched to a hand me down from my parents which was a generation older and the service was significantly better.
That fixed the actual problem in hardware - the software fix just made things look better.