Cell phones are full duplex devices, and use one frequency for talking, and separate frequency for listening, so you can talk and listen at the same time.
I have very few problems with connections, but admittedly it’s not quite as reliable as a landline, and the voice quality is lower. I have Verizon, for whatever it’s worth.
I get a lot of calls on my office phone from ATT Blackberries. The connection and voice quality are awful at times.
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Crap! We had a “discussion” at work where we write captions and subtitles about typing (cell phone rings) or (phone rings). I, and our clients agreed that (phone rings) is the best description, unless it’s a musical ring.
I remember the days where we begged our Ps to buy an EXTENDED coiled cable so we could stretch the receiver from the base down the hallway to the bedroom.
I get depressed when I hear a cell phone ring with the “authentic” bell ring from a Bell Princess phone or whatever. The bell shook the casing, no cell can do that.
Still, bottom line, I would DIE without a smartphone. I love this age to death technology-wise.
I don’t have the problem the OP has but THIS I can get behind. What’s even more aggravating is when you pull your phone away from your ear and the screen is black. Then you have to do that back and forth motion to get the screen to light up. GRRR!!
You hold your phone to your ear?
I couldn’t agree with the OP more. While celphones are great for portability, they suck for good communication.
The quality of the audio is usually poor; fuzzy and with a very limited frequency range. If I am trying to get an email address from someone, I have to be very careful to distinguish between “B”, “P”, and “T” and it would be impossible without phonics (Boy, Peter, Thomas).
If someone leaves a message on my voicemail from a celphone, the combined quality reduction sometimes makes it impossible to get their phone number or name later unless they repeat it several times.
The audio is frequently interrupted by very short dropouts, not from geographic causes, but just the system seems to tolerate a large number of gaps. “This is Sarah Thompson” becomes “his s sa oms”.
Then there’s the delay and echoes. The echo is so long sometimes that I can start speaking, hear a voice, pause because I think it’s the other party breaking in, but it’s my own voice coming back! And because the transmission is only one-way, if you do try to break in as in a normal dialogue, you can’t do it because the other party is talking and can’t hear you.
The delay is significant and makes intelligent dialogue difficult. I feel reduced to a child’s level of communication.
I long for the days when Sprint touted their (landline) service as good enough to hear a pin drop. We have eliminated quality for portability.
That may be the theoretical, but it doesn’t work that way in practice. One voice will blank the other every time, at least in all the communications I have been using for the past several years.
It could be he notices this in hands-free mode.
My cell audio cuts out when I run it through a blue tooth audio device like my car’s hands-free equipment.
I don’t know if it’s the cell phone or the blue tooth connection that does it.
That would be true if you have a bad signal, and both frequencies are dropping out.
I don’t think so. After using cellphones locally for years, with 2 carriers and several hand-held units (no hands-free ones), I feel strongly that if both sides talk at once, one will be blanked. I can never remember hearing both at once, but one interrupting the other (or not, when it should be).
You may not agree with me, but I am not speaking from ignorance. I have decades of audio experience as an engineer and studio musician and I’m much more sensitive and aware of this than the average dude.
I have had conversations where the other party was talking so continuously and going off on a tangent that I tried to interrupt with “stop…stop…stop…stop…” and the other party doesn’t hear me at all until there is a very short break in his speech.
Then you understand what full duplex means.
I fully understand, but it doesn’t seem to be what I am observing, and cmyk seems to agree with me.
It’s entirely possible that the transmission is 2-way, but the phone units themselves override it by internal software or circuitry.
My entire office building switched over to VOIP, using Microsoft Linc. Literally, if our MS server goes down and the email and Linc are down, then you can’t call 911 or anything for that matter from our building. We don’t have phone lines going in at all. You’d need to use your cell.
It’s an interesting concept, but there have been issues. Calls dropping, voices cutting in and out. Your call is always only as secure as your internet connection, since it’s through your laptop.
I predict that all offices will be like this in the not so distant future. I mean, why would a company want to pay a phone bill when they already have a network infrastructure in place that can do the same thing?
I agree, too. People think I should talk more on the phone - I say, why? The quality is not good, no body language, etc. Cell phones suck and they’re wonderful, all at the same time.
I can’t really force the people that I call to buy something else.
Last night I spent about 2 minutes trying to explain a simple concept to someone:
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see ee.
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Ompac iss.
Smart phones would be many dozens of times better if more of them had simple answer and end call buttons. I can live with using a touchpad for the numbers but answering, ending, and getting to the call screen are needlessly annoying and time consuming with most touchpad only phones.
I have to disagree with the OP as well. I have no trouble with voice or data connections on my new smart phone with Verizon. I live in Northern Virginia and Verizon has great coverage in this area. My work phone is on Sprint and I have terrible coverage on it, dropped calls, and tons of places where I get no data.
So, it sounds to me that the OP’s problem is most likely picking a bad carrier for where he lives, having made a poor choice in phone or it’s simply damaged, or just plain living in a bad area for cell phones in general.
Text. Talking is soooooo 20th century. Who cares what the other guy has to say anyway!
You’re disagreeing that some people have bad connections? Is it all in their heads?
It takes two to make a phone call. My phone, cheap as it is, works great. If I call someone’s land line, the connection is great. But if I call someone with a sucky phone or sucky connection, the call is going to suck for both of us. There’s not much I can do about that.
But that is significantly unhelpful. Yes, I have a TracFone. It’s not the greatest of phones, but it’s best for me in terms of cost and availability - I don’t sign a contract, I don’t pay monthly fees, etc. Are you telling me because I have a TracFone I should have to live with bad coverage? And this is OK, and I should just smile and put up with it? Worse yet, someone who does pay monthly fees and has a ‘proper’ contract should also just smile and put up with it?
That ignores the fundamental flaw - that we are letting them do this to us. Hell, we even pay for incoming calls which is just bullshit.
I have a Droid 1, bought it back in 2009 a month or so after it came out to replace my motorola q9m. I rarely hold it up to my ear, I use a wire earpiece instead. I live out in the sticks of eastern CT and have good coverage in my house. On our roadtrip earlier this year [we did a round trip to Fresno, Key West and home again using the northern route through Nebraska/Wyoming and heading home along the southern edge of the US and up the coast again] and we rarely had no signal at all. The phone chat quality has always been good, the GPS through Google Maps more or less good [it had troubles in some areas looking for obscure restaurants in confusing interchange areas] and as an ebook reader phenomenal. I rarely use it online, though I have used it as a connectivity source for my laptop in an emergency using PDAnet.