On the iPhone, signal-strength bars are not a reliable indicator of your local usability. My iPhone 3gs regularly shows 4 or 5 bars -- at the same instant it can't initiate a call or send an SMS. It's either showing some abstract measure of signal strength, unrelated to whether traffic can actually be sent, or it's been programmed to lie.
I would trust an unaffiliated speed test app or website server-side analysis much, much more than any count of signal-bars.
My point is that people are putting a lot of stock in signal-bars, assuming if there are 4-5 bars local service is good (and conversely that drops in signal-bar count mean bad service). That's not my experience in SF at all; the correlation used to exist, but in the last year, it broke. I can have usable calls at 0-2 bars; I can be unable to initiate or hold a call at 4-5 bars. It's some other capacity issue that's not measured with signal-bars that's AT&Ts giant problem.
I think the OPs point is that if this had been an issue with an Android phone Gruber would have jumped all over it as an example of how the phone manufacturer doesn't pay attention to detail and gets the simple things wrong.
I tend to agree on that criticism of Gruber but it isn't really worth pointing out. Everyone here already knows he is very biased and it is reflected in his writing.
