Apple patching iOS reception glitch next week?

If comments posted on Apple’s official forums are anything to go by, there may be a firmware update to the new iPhone OS platform as early as next week and it expected to target the issue of customers losing reception just from touching the edge of their phone.

Despite the fact that publications all around the world gushed about the iPhone 4 and the newly designed user interface, the usually “flawless” Apple came under fire over the last few days because of a weird reception bug.

Dozens of consumers reported that when they held the edges of the phone, their reception was immediately killed. The iPhone 4’s antenna is wrapped around the device in a metal casing.

But even people with an iPhone 3GS who upgraded their software to iOS 4 were reporting similar issues, leading many to believe it was a software problem instead of a defect in the construction of the iPhone 4.

According to AppleInsider.com, Apple’s official tech support forums lit up with discussion about this issue, and employee posts on the forum said that a firmware update was expected to come as early as Monday.

However, even before the blogosphere picked up on those comments, Apple pulled them and also took down almost all of the discussion about the so-called “Death Grip” glitch.

The forum posts reportedly confirmed that iOS 4 has reception problems when it loses one mobile signal and needs to switch over to another – something that was not an issue with the previous iPhones.

The fact that Apple pulled the discussion leads to the idea that either someone was posting an official comment without the proper authority, or the fix isn’t as easy as they expected. In the mean time, there’s always the more fashionable fix.