Flutterby™! : cell phone clarity 2000-12-09 18:57:13+00

cell phone clarity

2000-12-09 18:57:13+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

I haven't really played with cell phones before. As Todd and I explore the messaging and feature set of these new Nokia 8290s, I think it's ironic that this current top of the line digital phone has a_l t_e c__l clar_ty of t_e c_m__rci__s t_at cl__m d__it_l is be___r th_n a_a_og. At least from Todd's and my houses (checked with land-lines on either end). And when I first fired it up I thought "hey, it's got a contact manager and date book, and we're gonna make it talk to information sources, this doesn't bode well for the Palm!" After looking at how they structure service plans and an hour or two playing with it I've got the feeling I had in the early '90s about ISDN from the BBSer perspective, talking with phone company people who couldn't understand why you'd want to use the D channel. They've got the resources to do cool stuff, but they really just don't get it. Just as packet switched networks were the future then and phone companies couldn't understand that, it seems from my awfully luddite perspective (yes, this is my first cell phone) that there's amazing potential here that's just being squandered by both the phone manufacturers and the service providers.

LOL The clarity is highly dependent on the network in your area. I've had excellent results with my Nokia 6162. As for the phone company leaving resources lie idle, hey, that's nothing new.

I'm using a Digital StarTac with GTE/Verizon service and it works great. In the bay area the quality of cell service varies greatly depending on who you have. Sprint and PacBell are pretty much the worst providers in the area. Basically, if you are mostly in the bay area then Verizon is the way to go, it you travel a lot, ATT as the best overall coverage in the nation.

I get pretty good quality at my end with Sprint Digital and a Qualcomm phone but I've had complaints at the other end of the conversation. As far as the organizers go, there is no way to sync them to a PC so you have to enter the data from the handset (at least, my phone works that way). I just carry both my phone and my palm.

Audio quality seems to be an issue of location, I think the issue is that I'm on the fringes of all wireless coverage and Todd is on the wrong side of the hill. When the audio comes through it's fine, when it doesn't it drops out rather than being munged or staticky. The Nokia phones all seem to sync via IRDA, a lame standard, but a semi-supported ones. Yet to be tried 'cause we still need to work out some service plan issues is replacing the OmniSky with an IR link between the Palm and the phone.

If syncing your data between devices was all you were concerned about, which I know it isn't, then fusionOne ought to be of some help. Using the IRDA port for syncing a web-enabled phone to anything seems unnecessary. I would thing that most of its data ought to reside on the web in the first place. Didn't Qualcom offer a PalmOS based cell phone about a year ago? What ever happened to it?

Audio quality is an issue of *protocol*. CDMA degrades almost not at all until it drops the call on you. TDMA and GSM both tend to get very mechanical and metallic, GSM moreso. I have Primeco CDMA-1900, in The Other Bay Area, and the only problem has been cell penetration. I've been barefoot for almost 3 years, and until they got a cell near my house, it was a bit painful. The Qualcomm pDQ phone bombed miserably; there's a replacement due out that uses CDMA-data rather than CDPD; see my rant on that topic here.