Today's "phones" are "phones" in name only

The BBQ Pit
#1

I do appreciate the convenience of cel phones. But god, the quality of voice communications these days sucks whale cock.

“Say that again - I lost you for a second…”

“Wait, let me go near the window…”

“Call me back later, it’s not working…”

“What?!?!”

This is when the call isn’t dropped, which happens all the time. So it seems the leap forward in convenience and capabilities of “phones” comes at the cost of being able to actually hear the person with whom you’re speaking. Land lines in the 70’s were way better in that sense.

I’m a person who is foolish enough to use my “phone” much more often for voice than texting or data, so I find this sort of depressing. We should stop referring to these devices as “phones” and call them what they are - small computers that can possibly, if you’re lucky, on a good day, make a voice call if you absolutely must.

Whale cock, I tell you! Whale cock.

#2

Wait…

You mean I can call someone on this?!

I always wondered why they called it an “iPhone”… :smack:

#3

Yawn. Get a different carrier and stop yer bitching old man.

#4

Hey, I’m no old man and I agree with the OP. It’s not so much the call quality as it is the ease of just being able to make and then end a fucking call (but the quality sucks donkey balls as well). There is no “button” to speak of in which one can push to end the call; rather one must find the damned screen that has corresponding touch screen that hangs up the call. And it’s not on your screen at the end of your call, you must scroll back, wait for the screen to light up, and then hope you don’t accidentally hit one of the touch-screen buttons on either side of the “end call” button. Ugh. Sometimes I will be driving in my car, thinking I had already hung my phone up, when out of nowhere I will hear “Hey man, hello? Hello?” “Why did you call me?” mysteriously being emitted from my pocket.

In this sense, I miss telephones. I could hang up in a huff with those. Not anymore. :frowning:

#5

They’re radios. RADIOS! Eeensy-teensy walkie-talkies with keypads and screens and computers and shit.

#6

Exactly. The only time I have trouble with a call is when I’m talking to one of my friends who have Sprint. Dayum, it doesn’t matter where I am or they are, the connection sucks. And god forbid I try to talk to them thru my GPS.

#7

My office can be a bit of a Fortress of Solitude so far as my cell goes, but other than that it works just fine–and it’s the much-maligned iPhone on the much-maligned AT&T network.

#8

My coworker was opining today how much more secure things would be if we used voice recognition. With today’s call quality? I don’t think so.

#9

You guys are aware they make more kinds of phones than just smart phones, right? If the call quality truly is from the phone, you can buy something else that suits your needs better. If you want physical buttons, they make plenty of them. Smart phones, even, with physical buttons.

#10

I agree. I originally had an iPhone on AT&T, briefly switched to a Droid phone on Verizon, then switched back to an iPhone on Verizon.

All of them had uniformly poor voice quality, and frequently dropped calls while I was in the car. Verizon was a bit better than AT&T in this respect, but not by much (and seems to have degraded recently).

After exclusively using a cell phone for the past 8 years or so, I finally broke down and got a land line installed in my office.

#11

I’m afraid that I can’t get behind this rant. The sound quality on my droid is incredible. It doesn’t drop calls and I can get good internet connection almost anywhere. I hated my landline. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it was broken and the fix was almost hours and sometimes days. My droid is never offline.

(I don’t drive and surf the internet…but when I have drivers, I spend a lot of time playing with my phone.)

#12

It takes a while to perfect any technology. Landlines required a lot more people to maintain them until PIC cable replaced the old lead-and-paper cabling, back in the 80s. The tiniest bit of water would cause outages and call quality issues.

Another reason cell voice quality sucks, compared to landlines, is that it takes more bandwidth to have good voice quality. The cell companies realize that most of their biggest-paying customers are smartphone users, who usually care more about data than voice, so they use only the absolute minimum bandwidth for voice, and give everything else over to data. In Europe they have better voice quality, because the cell companies use more bandwidth for voice. They have free wifi almost everywhere non-rural there, even small towns, so people use wifi for data and cell networks for voice. Here, free wifi is very rare, so the cell network is overloaded with demand for data.

#13

Nope, not the carrier or the quality (although, dropped calls and choppy reception are inevitable).

I hate cells because they are two-way radios. In the sense that the call has an ever so slight delay, and only one can speak, while the other listens at a time.

It’s not like a landline where two sides cand talk AND hear at the same time. This, for me at least, seems to be a critical factor for smooth and natural conversation, as there’s always some laughter, intermediate responses (“yep” “right” “uh huh”), and even conversational interruptions, etc.

On cell phones, stuff like that degrades my natural flow of conversing to the point I’d rather just text or call on a landline if I can help it. YMMV.

#14

Its a major advance in my social involvement, now the people who never call me also never text me.

#15

“Roger that, sir. Acquiring Sno-Cone.”

#16

I’m not used to cell phones, and often accidentally hang-up while trying to answer, or make other such errors. We’re lucky to live just 2 miles from a tower, but the neighboring village lacks reception. One often sees a few teenagers on motorcycles in a desolate area outside their village. Are they dealing or taking drugs? Waiting in ambush? No, they just have to go there to get signal and chat on their phones. :smack:

Land-wire phone is not an option, however. Our road did have wires for pay phones once but
[ul][li] the phone company operating the pay phones was not the company authorized to provide home phones in our area. :dubious:[/li][li] the pay phones have long-since been disabled anyway, with the wires stolen and sold for copper. :smack:[/li][/ul]

#17

Hmm…I haven’t had problems with broken or dropped calls in years. A decade ago it was a serious annoyance, but coverage and tech seems to have improved to the point where I thought those things were largely solved issues.

I guess it depends on where you are, I’m sure very rural areas still have spotty or no coverage. But the places I’ve lived and traveled in the last couple years have had relatively low pop. density and I haven’t noticed lack of coverage unless I am camping in Western Maine or some similarly out of the way spot.

#18

I agree with the OP 100%.

I had a smartphone, doesn’t matter which one. It was a clever device, but I didn’t like it as a PHONE. It was uncomfortable to use. It felt like talking into a bar of soap. I returned it and got a regular flip phone, which I still use contentedly.

I’ve got an iPod touch, which I carry and use all the time for all the neat things you can do with a small portable internet-connected computer.

I think the whole Smartphone thing is a brilliant stroke of marketing, especially by Apple. They’ve expanded their market for computers by not calling them computers, whether it’s the iPod touch, or the iPhone.

#19

I’m behind this rant 100%. We’re about to move, and we’re getting a land line because at least half the time, we can’t get calls to go through, or they get dropped, or we can’t hear a damn thing the other person is saying. My husband and I spent half a hour trying to call each other yesterday when I was right outside of Boston, and neither of our calls went through until about the 20th time we tried. He has Verizon, I’ve got t-mobile. Both crap.

#20

Have you got a cite for this? I have never found this to be the case on a cellphone. It’s not like a walkie-talkie where you can’t hear incoming sounds while you’re transmitting.

I have an iPhone, which are reputed to have dreadful call quality, and I find it just as good as my old land line, assuming a good signal.