I guess almost everyone who has been following news about Apple's new iPhones have already heard about the antenna problems. Because the iPhone 4 antenna is located in the metal frame of the phone, you could cause a network connection to drop just by keeping your hand in the wrong place. On Friday, Apple promised to give free plastic cases to all iPhone 4 owners to keep fingers away from the metal. 

At the same time, Apple released also an update to the iOS operating system. They claimed that there has been a bug that made the phone show too many bars on its signal display. That way, your phone would have been showing 4-5 bars even though really the signal strength was maybe 1-2 bars. The update fixed the signal bar display to show realistic number of bars (and hopefully made you understand that touching the antenna when there is only one bar makes your phone probably disconnect).

The update was sent to all devices, not just iPhone 4, so my one-year-old 3GS got also updated Thursday evening (even though there's nothing wrong with its antenna). And just as expected, I also got less signal bars than before.

This is something that will surely divid people's opinions. Some will get angry and feel that they're treated like idiots: just adding pixels to images don't make signal any better. Some will think this as nice example of subtle UX design, dealing with people's impressions of quality and usability.

Seems that Nokia has known this for a long time, because on new devices all the signal bars are same length. :)

(yes, in case you wondered, the title should contain a smiley face in it)