Apple finally admitted to signal issues in its iPhone 4 this weekend after rumours surrounding the issue, and the company’s response to it, began to wreak havoc online after it was launched two weeks ago. 

In an official response Apple admits to signal problems, albeit in an unexpected way, choosing rather to blame the device software as apposed to the positioning of its signal receiver.

“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” commented the company.

“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.”

In order to rectify this Apple has confirmed that it will “ issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.”

Although this explanation seems decidedly fishy to us, considering the fact that the error appeared to be more closely related to the poor positioning of the iPhone 4’s receiver, it indicates that Apple has acknowledged the complaints and intends to do something about it - a marked departure from Steve Job’s reported comments that users were simply “holding it wrong”.