I never understood why this feature was needed, so bear with me.
In one situation, the phone makes a noise, the owner of the phone picks it up and says “Hello,” the caller states his business, and the conversation proceeds in a private, intelligible, uninterrupted manner.
In the other, the phone makes a noise, the caller states his business, and the conversation proceeds in a noisy, garbled, and constantly interrupted manner.
Is 20 seconds of waiting for the ring to be answered so horrible that this mess is preferable?
A-fucking-men! (Side note, on the evening train that I take, the conductor makes a point to specifically disallow use of “walkie talkie type phones”. Remind me to send him a Christmas card.
Or some secular holiday.
(Sorry, long day, I think I unwound just a little too much)
Are you telling me that people have out loud conversations on these fucking annoying things and you can actually OPEN THEM UP and have the same conversation without annoying others? You have GOT to be shitting me.
I’m not even kidding- I’ve never used one myself- I just figured that the whole BLEEP “HI!” BLEEP “HI” BLEEP “WHASSUP?” BLEEP “NOT MUCH!”, etc was just the way these phones worked and you had no choice.
The utility of the walkie-talkie is not self-evident. I don’t think Nextel, itself, understood the efficacy of this technology when it first began selling it. I have also spoken to a few of people who thought they would never use it, but later said that they love it.
You really do notice the call set-up wait period, the pleasantries, the waiting to see if someone is done speaking, the repetition of spoken sentences because the callers were speaking at the same time and the multiple “good-byes”/“see you laters” of the normal phone calls. With the walkie-talkie it can be:
1: Beep.
2: What’s up.
1: Do have the total cost for the Simpson PO?
2. $475
1: Thanks. Did you fax it in, yet?
2: Yep.
1: Thanks again. Later.
It is very quick. It doesn’t tie up the phone line. If you need to look for an answer, the other party doesn’t have the phone hanging off his shoulder waiting for you. He just beeps you back. You also know when you can talk and you don’t feel that you have to say hello or good-bye. The medium instills the informality.
That said, I wouldn’t use it to call grandma to catch up on what’s going on. Informality and impersonality are not always appropriate or desirable. Fear not, though. If that human touch is required you can still use the cell phone… or an IM. I’m told that writing is much more personal. Too bad that typing takes so dang long.
They’re better if it’s a quickie question as someone mentioned above, and they don’t go towards your minutes, which is nice.
But I didn’t know you could open them up and make them quieter and I’ve had mine for about 2 months now. Although I’ve had mine off for a bit ever since I was taking a deposition and had turned my phone to vibrate. SO used the feature (which does not have a “silent” feature and in the middle of the depo I get: BEEP “Baby I wish you’d come sit on my face.” SO said later he did not know I was in a depo and thought for sure that if I was doing anything important the phone woulda been off.
No one at the deposition could look me in the eye.
I’m a technician who works on wireless technology and I might be able to clarify a bit.
Half Duplex - in technical terms is actually caled Simplex.
Simplex = Communication can travel either in or out but not at the same time.
Duplex = Communication travels in both send and recieve at the same time.
All cell phones are full Duplex, so why would you want to lower the quality of the ability to have a conversation? Because it’s a neat toy and cell phone makers know that when a neat toy is invented, whether practiccal or not, there is a whole sub-culture of schmucks that will buy into it.
Unfortunately, we are stuck with technology such as this being integrated into already existing products, because it would be cost prohibitive to have stand-alone products doing this exact same thing.
On the other hand, consumers have proven, people like inetgrated technologies. The more technocrap you put into a single product the more marketing appeal it has for the teeming masses.
But has anybody really contemplated the practicality of this? In order to use the PTT feature the other person has to have the same capability on the same carrier right? So not only do you have to have one, but the person you wish to talk to has to have one as well. So you have to buy Two phones with this technology. hmmm…this thing has a phone feature also, does it not? Most cell providers are giving free Mobile2mobile minutes. My wife and I have unlimited Mobile2mobile and we use it a lot. In fact, we almost never use the FRS radios I bought a few years ago.
Sorry…I guess I went off on a bit of a tangent. at any rate, count me in as one who Loves technology, but this one just has to go.
I don’t think PTT (push-to-talk, not post, telephone an telegraph) is going away anytime soon. Verizon, Sprint and Alltel have all launched this functionality within the last year because of the huge profit that Nextel has been making from PTT. I agree that all the carriers have had to graft this technology onto their existing technology, with the exception of Nextel. Nextel is using Mototrola’s iDEN technology which was designed with dispatch (PTT) and cellular (full duplex, circuit-switched, mobile voice communication) integrated into the same radio equipment. As NorwegianBlue seems to be pointing out, the difficulties that the non-Nextel carriers have had in competing with Nextel, is that the PTT functionality has just been tacked on and is noticeably slower than the iDEN technology. (The technologies used by the various carriers for PTT are vastly different, though, and one can expect better performance from the newer entries as time goes on.)
It is seconds to minutes faster to dispatch from Lima, Peru to Des Moines, Iowa than it is to make a phone call. That is part of the big attraction to PTT. Half duplex operation can also be cheaper that full duplex and it is not always important that two people be able to talk at the same time (or near the same time) as is possible with full duplex. (If one of the phones is a speaker phone, full duplex doesn’t work all that well anyway.)
Keep in mind that this technology is not new. The military, police, fire and utilities have been using it for decades. What is new is that over the last three years, the US cellular carriers have recognized that:
-Nextel is not going to go away (as many of the carriers had originally expected)
-the carriers had no way to compete with Nextel’s dispatch option
-police and fire were used this functionality and Nextel had begun to start taking a lot of these contracts solely because of the PTT function
-Nextel had begun offering this service to the Youth market, which seemed to like the PTT functionality
-Nextel is able to charge higher prices for the PTT option and leads the market in Average Revenue Per Unit while the other carriers have often found themselves slugging it out in an airline-like low-price war
I believe the various US carriers felt that they had to offer PTT just to compete with Nextel and the European carriers are following suit. The PTT functionality may be subsumed by some more advanced technology, but I do not think that it is going away. (I do believe that government-owned the PTTs (Post, Telephone and Telegraph) are going away, though.)
In keeping with this forum I will say that I, too, despise people carrying on overly loud conversations in public places. I also am annoyed by people who will walk away from their PTT phone for over a few minutes at a time. It seems that these people are prone to getting dispatch alerts from others and that everyone in the office will have to listen to those alert beeps every 15 seconds until one of us gets feed up enough to go find the phone and turn-off the alert. I think all of these issues are caused by people’s actions, not the technology in use.
The first time I saw a commercial for one (the couple was getting married and were giving their vows via those stupid idiotic things) I immediately wondered “what the fuck? How is that any more convienent than a cell phone?”
I still don’t get it.
I also didn’t know you could open them up and use them as regular phones. That makes me wonder even more what the hell is the point? Maybe I lack the self importance many others apparently have, but I would hate for any number of random strangers to be able to hear my entire conversation. I’ll put my phone on silent (and only answer if it’s actually important) when I’m in a store or other public place for this reason alone. I don’t want to hear other people’s inane conversations, why would they want to hear mine?
And bottled blonde genie’s little story should be enough of a lesson on why these things are highly inappropriate for everday use. At least if you’ve got a SO prone to radio in nasty little messages at random times throughout the day.
If I am not mistaken, one advantage you have with PTT is the ability to not just call a single person but to call groups. So there isn’t any need for the main office for a plumber to call each plumber out in the field if they could swing by Mrs. Johansens’ and rescue her diamond wedding ring because she knocked it down the sink again. Sure they can use radios for the same purpose but then they have to buy the radio equipment, lease the tower/repeater, and still pick up the bill for the cellphone because it is used for work as well.
But there really isn’t that much of a use for it with a family because you don’t have to call multiple SOs to find out if they need anything from the store on your way home from work. At least not folk outside of Utah.
Actually, I don’t no anybody who has feedback problems on a cell phone.
Audio feedback is when speaker and mic are too close together and the same sound gets re-amplified over and over until a loud painful screech occurs. This only applies to analog amplifiers.
With digital phones it is actually an impossibility due to the nature of the technology. You seee, Your Voice is being digitally encoded for transmission over UHF band Frequencies and simultaneously what you are receiving is being un-encoded in a different digital circuit from a slightly offset frequency. There is a very brief Audio lag that results from this. At worst you might here your own voice coming back through the other persons phone if they have their volume set too high, or vice versa, But Audio Feedback is impossible over a digital circuit.
