With all the bad press surrounding the iPhone 4 lately, could Apple be doing a silent recall? Gizmodo has some readers that have written in to say that after exchanging their iPhone 4's they have received slightly different hardware, and their problems have gone away.

One user claimed that the hardware was tweaked to fix these issues:

"Well, when I got the new phone it was different. It was different hardware. The black [plastic] bezel isn't as black on the new one. I couldn't see the proximity sensor at all on the previous iPhone 4, now I can. The stainless steel band on the new phone is less 'steel-y' and more matte. I've also tried to replicate the signal drop and failure. While I can't say for sure that it is entirely fixed, there is certainly huge improvement. I'm guessing they coated the steel with something, took some black out of the bezel and sent them out without saying too much about it. I also think Apple is willing to warranty a phone for any reason except the signal issue."

Is Apple silently improving the iPhone 4? If they are, that would be a good thing to do except they'd better come out with it publicly. If it ever got out that they were doing this too quietly that would be very damaging to the company's image.

Gizmodo has a running live update page regarding this issue and it's worth reading. If you have an iPhone 4 and are experiencing poor performance it might be worth exchanging it to see what happens.