Audio/Voice Quality Discussion?

I am looking at various phones for myself. One test I am doing is to call from the cell phone in the vendor's store to my home answering machine to check on the quality of the outgoing call. I am finding a considerable variation in this quality, all the way from "virtually unusable" to "almost as good as my land line". I was browsing this forum and find very little discussion of audio/voice quality; and I searched for terms like 'voice quality' or 'distortion' or such and did not find much. I would like to initiate such a discussion and post my results. Where would be the best sub forum to do this? Thanks.

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In searching for a new phone, I conducted a test of outbound call quality for various devices in two Verizon Wireless stores. I made calls on the live store phones to my home answering machine. Then I went home and listened to the messages played back. I graded them on a scale from 0 to 5, with 0 being unusable and 5 being almost as clear as my land line. I list below the results. As others have noted, the Blackberry Tour was barely usable (two different phones were tested from two separate stores). The best result was from my 4 year old legacy monochrome screen Samsung SCH-a310!

I just tested the available phones in the store; did not get into questions of when or where they were made, ‘green dots’, etc. I also did not try to ‘enhance’ a phone’s audio settings, just took it as it was on display. Also, I just used the device’s normal microphone, no Bluetooth, etc.

I had been hoping to invest in the functionality of a BlackBerry, but these calling quality results are disappointing. I have not had the opportunity to test an iPhone, but plan to do so before making my decision. Posting for any comments, thanks.

PHONE DEVICE/SCORE/ANSWERING MACHINE RESULT
BLACKBERRY TOUR/1/Distortion, noisy (two units tested)
BLACKBERRY STORM/3/Better than Tour; some breath ‘puffs’
B.B. 8830 World Edition/3/ Background noise & breath puffs
BLACKBERRY BOLD/not tested/device not in this store
BLACKBERRY CURVE/not tested/Phone in store “not activated”
LG VERSA/4/Quite good (two units tested)
LG ENV TOUCH/4-/Good (two units tested)
SAMSUNG OMNIA /4+/Very good, but some background noise pickup
SAMSUNG SCH-a310/5/Best; very clear (4 year old legacy phone)
MOTOROLA KRAVE ZN4/4+/Very good

p.s. the grade for LG ENV touch is 4- (=minus); for Omnia and Krave it is 4+ (=plus).