Especially entertaining is the update note at the bottom:
The "3G signal strength display" fix certainly seems to have done something for my iPhone 3G: it's sitting here in the same place on my desk, and has gone from two bars of 3G signal with the 2.0.2 software to a whopping five bars in version 2.1.
Yep, they effectively made the signal strength meter useless in that update so that users would psychologically feel that they had a good connection even though AT&T's network was terrible in places.
When your phone shows 5 bars yet you still get dropped calls, distorted sound, etc, you know there is a problem with the signal strength meter.
They might as well have just made it 1 bar, either you have signal or you don't. But there may be something about the placebo effect, or maybe illiterate tech reviewers would actually write "my iPhone has more bars!1!1!11!1!"
Right now, iPhone 4 shows that if the signal is in the top 50% of dBm range, then it shows 5 bars. If that was implemented back in 2.1, then yes, you're right, the fix coming out would make it "even more accurate" by undoing what 2.1 OS patch did.
http://gizmodo.com/5048905/iphone-21-update-available-now
Especially entertaining is the update note at the bottom:
The "3G signal strength display" fix certainly seems to have done something for my iPhone 3G: it's sitting here in the same place on my desk, and has gone from two bars of 3G signal with the 2.0.2 software to a whopping five bars in version 2.1.