Dangit, I don't want to give up my new phone but

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My wife and I finally got smart phones yesterday. We like them a lot. Except for one thing.

The sound quality is terrible! Everybody we try to talk to sounds like autotuned robots. You can barely understand them.

This is happening on both of our new phones (identical models). This seems clearly phone related and not network related since it’s the same network and we were not having this problem on the previous phones.

Called “tech support” and they said all they can do is give us new phones in the same model. This will probably not fix anything. We will probably simply have to go back to our old crappy-ass flip phones. (The new ones were deeply discounted. We don’t really want to spend more than we did.)

So before I give up, I ask if there is any wisdom about such matters on the dope. Can a voice quality problem like the one I described possibly be fixed by me in some way? Or is this a give-up-on-the-phone situation for sure?

It’s a Kyocera Event. The service provider is Virgin Mobile.

2

PCMag review.

3

I had read other reviews but not that one. The ones I read said the call quality is average. :frowning:

I know it’s not a “nice phone” but I wouldn’t expect one to be sold where you literally can’t understand people on the other end. And even if they did, I’d expect to see complaints about it online or something, but I’ve found nothing. I did find one “autotuned robots” reference for another model of phone, and that person was advised to turn off “voice protection”, but mine seems to have no such option. :frowning:

4

I notice it says

Does this seem to be implying that call quality is better through Bluetooth? Is that plausible?

5

Certainly.
It’s not using the crappy mic in the phone, but rather the one in the bluetooth earpiece.

6

Crappy mic? What I’m worried about is what I hear, not what my interlocutor hears.

But if it’s a speaker problem and not a signal processing problem, I guess it’s possible!

I’ve never dealt with Bluetooth before. Would there be an easy way for me to borrow somebody else’s device to test out the possibility? Or is the process of registering a Bluetooth device to a phone arduous enough to make this unrealistic?

7

You can totally pair someone else’s earpiece with your phone to check it out. The phone store may also have a display model you can try.

8

Wait, you’re using your phone to TALK to people? Like, with your VOICE? I didn’t know you could still do that.:wink:

9

I am on my fourth or fifth smartphone over the last ten years or so. This one is a Motorola. None of them have sound as good as my earlier cell phones, and for me, the little flip phones seemed to be the best.

I think the more stuff they put on the phone, the worse it is as a phone. I carry my iPad almost everywhere, so I’m tempted to just go back to a flip phone so I can actually make and receive calls.

10

Smartphones aren’t really phones at all. They’re portable computers that happen to make poor-quality phone calls.

11

Yeah, I am thinking I just need to recalibrate my idea of what “average” means in this context. (In other words: lower my standards…)

I’ve now tried out two long-ish workrelated calls on the thing with easy office phone backup available and, well, I think I can live with it. I found people incomprehensible the first few times I used the thing yesterday and the day before, but today it has not seemed as bad. Not that the problem had gotten better, but that I’d gotten better at decoding what I was hearing.

Interestingly, the effect is much worse for female voices. I don’t know if that is the result of a distinction in what the phone is doing, or a distinction in what my brain is doing.

12

How’s your signal strength? If I have a poor signal and end up losing a call, the person on the other end sounds more and more robot-y before the call is dropped.