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Sometimes a dozen pixel might cause huge (financial) problems. After just a week of availability, Apple’s iPhone 4 is the subject of a class-action lawsuit. The focus of the lawsuit seemed to be a defective antenna. In the meantime Apple PR has issued a letter responding to the slew of complaints regarding the faulty antenna and signal strength display on the new iPhone4. The letter says that the antenna is perfect but “… we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.”

And: “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.”

To fix this, Apple is adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the bars will report it more accurately, providing users a better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. And: “We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see”.

Beside using a wrong formula Apple admits that the rising design of the bars is mistakable: cutting away the 2 highest bars means a loss of display area of 64% while the actual signal strength might be down for just 40%. The psychological effect in the users eyes is dramatic.

My suggestion is: give all bars the same length and a gradient from light gray to darker gray.