How would you rate the voice quality and general ‘phone’ aspects of each of the mobile platforms you have tried, including aspects such as speakerphone etc. Up to 5 can be listed. Mine are-
1/ Symbian (Nokia)
2/ BlackBerry
3/ Windows Mobile
4/ Palm OS
5/ iPhone
Nokia – best, especially the Nokia 5800
SE – the P990 is a superb phone
WM – the SE X1 is the best, the HTC Touch Diamond acceptable
Have to agree as a phone my Nokia E71 trumps my previous Palm, WM phones and the iphone I tried.
I have never even tried out a blackberry so cannot comment..
I have no personal experience with iPhone or Blackberry but from what I’ve used:
1) Nokia / Symbian
2) Windows Mobile
3) Palm
2 and 3 are close. I’m finding my current Nokia smartphone is miles ahead in this area.
1. iPhone
2. Blackberry
3. Palm
I haven’t used a Nokia, WM or Android smartphone. However, my memories of basic Nokia phones are that they always have good call quality.
My Blackberry 7100 had terrible call quality as do my Treo 680. Hard to tell which was worse.
My recollection of Nokia’s I’ve owned is that they’re a great “phone”.
Palm Treos were dodgy, Centro is better.
iPhone is fine for me.
Never used a BB
This is a bit more difficult as there are pros and cons and so much varying hardware but here goes:
1) Symbian – I’ve never had a symbian device with duff call quality or poor usability as a phone.
2) Android – call quality and signal strength is generally very good on my G1, but the battery life is woefull and the ring is far too quiet.
3) iPhone – I’ve had too many dropped calls to put this higher up, and the call quality is ok rather than spectacular.
4) Palm – My treos were always ok in this regard, but not always the best with signal strength and had a few too many spontaneous resets
5) WM – It feels harsh putting this at the bottom, as my HTC s620 was brilliant but it wasn’t a full blown touch screen phone. I’m afraid all the WM Professional devices I’ve had have been very poor phones.
1) Nokia has to be the best all-rounder in my opinion. Though I wonder if that also depends on which Nokia you buy (unlike in the past maybe?!) I had a terrible time hearing my wife through her Nokia 6120 (I think it was) a Symbian s60 device. I was almost glad when she dropped yet another mobile and had to use her old, cheap Sony one again, because at least it was easy to hear her.
2) I hated my 1st WM phone, the Touch when I 1st got it. Resets during low coverage, tinny voice, bad speaker phone and difficult to use. BUT, after a hard reset, installing only what I really need/use minimum, I’ve had no problems with dropped calls, resets, and voice and coverage have been good – at some point even better than my Nokia… that’s why I went back to it. It has really grown on my despite it’s lack. The thing is that you can find everything it’s missing… but should you HAVE TO DO THAT? What if you’re not into that sort of thing, but you end up with a WM phone?
3) Palm (in my case the Treo 600) started off good, though obvious things missing, such as GPRS monitor, considering at the time I was paying through the roof for a mere 15MB and I couldn’t afford to go over that limit! Later I started having such bad problems with hearing and speaking to people that it became more or less useless as a phone, because I simply could not communicate with people! The same goes for Palm as for WM. You can find everything for it… but out of the box it doesn’t do all the basic phone functions a Nokia does.
I have no experience with the other smart phones out there. But it does make it hard choosing another phone, since each has their merits.
The iPhone has good signal strength and call quality although I find the speakerphone abysmal…
For all the other platforms there are too many variables, handsets, manufacturers, etc. to judge. My old XDA IIi would never recover a signal when coming out of a no signal area, whilst my Universal would miss calls completely on its original rom, it took so long to wake up and start ringing. Later roms fixed that bug thankfully.
My P800 is the only device I’ve had that’s drawn comment on call quality – and it was all negative – along the lines of ‘are you speaking down a tube?’