Phone Sound Quality Declining

After seven years of using my Qualcomm QCP-2700 phone, I am going to
have to buy a new phone. My battery is dying.

I have tried out a number of phones at the Sprint Store. From these
phones I call home and leave a message on my answering machine. While
I'm there, I also call from my present QCP-2700. In every case, I find
when I get home that my words are much clearer coming from my old 1998
phone.

What gives? I would think that with advances in technology that the
newer phones would be better. Not so! I hate to give up my old
clunker if I have to give up the quality I'm getting now.

Your comments would be appreciated.

FirstHit

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"FirstHit" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> After seven years of using my Qualcomm QCP-2700 phone, I am going to
> have to buy a new phone. My battery is dying.
>
> I have tried out a number of phones at the Sprint Store. From these
> phones I call home and leave a message on my answering machine. While
> I'm there, I also call from my present QCP-2700. In every case, I find
> when I get home that my words are much clearer coming from my old 1998
> phone.
>
> What gives? I would think that with advances in technology that the
> newer phones would be better. Not so! I hate to give up my old
> clunker if I have to give up the quality I'm getting now.
>
> Your comments would be appreciated.
>
The only possible issues with the QCP-2700 would be its size (compared to
the newer phones) and lack of features (compared to the newer phones).
Beyond that, it's still a no-nonsense, well-built phone with very good call
quality and very good signal reliability.

Also, searches on Gigablast, Yahoo, and Google search engines for "QCP-2700
battery" show multiple shopping sites that either sell genuine or compatible
batteries for the Qualcomm/Kyocera QCP-2700 phones.

If obtaining a new phone isn't an immediate priority, just getting another
battery would seem like a good idea, and then the phone could continue to be
used. A genuine battery is always preferred over a compatible battery, and
of course, try to find the lowest possible price.

It's the 3G protocol. They are compressing the data more now and the
quality is indeed lower. The 2700 was not a 3G phone, and uses more
bandwidth.

The price for progress!

>> What gives? I would think that with advances in technology that the
>> newer phones would be better. Not so!

Its a simple trade off between voice quality and making service affordable,
i.e. loading as many user as possible on a channel.

At one time, mobile service (the old IMTS) with 5 KHz deviation (channel
bandwidth) was so clear, it would pass Touch-Tones, but...it only supported
ONE person per channel. The entire Dallas & Fort Worth are had EIGHT
channels and a 5 year waiting list to get a carphone and an hour wait to get
a find an idle channel (unless you knew how to monitor the channel in Manual
mode and slam the handset down the moment you heard the Idle tone and hit
the Home or Roam mode button).

Enter analog cellular with about 100 channels per cell (the other 600
channels were used in the adjacent cells - quality was still good, just more
Rayleigh flutter due to the shorter wavelength.

Along comes TDMA which crams 24 conversations into one 5 KHz radio channel.
First you bandwidth limit the analog audio to only 2,800 Hz or so (which is
actually hardly noticeable), then you compress it down to only 200 Hz
(roughly).

Now when the digitized signal gets converted to back to analog, the
quantitization errors make for crappy reproduction of voice (and THAT *IS*
noticeable).

Bottom line...you can get 24 times the revenue at the expense of voice
quality. Of course Sprint uses CDMA, but the principle of compressing a
signal and loosing quality (the Shannon Law) still applies.

Daniel W. Rouse Jr. wrote:

> The only possible issues with the QCP-2700 would be its size (compared to
> the newer phones) and lack of features (compared to the newer phones).
> Beyond that, it's still a no-nonsense, well-built phone with very good call
> quality and very good signal reliability.
>
> Also, searches on Gigablast, Yahoo, and Google search engines for "QCP-2700
> battery" show multiple shopping sites that either sell genuine or compatible
> batteries for the Qualcomm/Kyocera QCP-2700 phones.
>
> If obtaining a new phone isn't an immediate priority, just getting another
> battery would seem like a good idea, and then the phone could continue to be
> used. A genuine battery is always preferred over a compatible battery, and
> of course, try to find the lowest possible price.

Thanks for the good advice. I am not sure what I'll do, but I am
leaning toward getting the new battery. I like the QCP-2700 and the
sound quality is important to me. The size is comfortable for talking,
but it's a little big for carrying around. Also, it would be nice to
have a larger phone book. I agree, a genuine battery is the way to go!

FirstHit

Thanks, Ray and DTC. It's good to know what's going on so I won't be
pulling my hair out trying to find a phone that sounds like my
Qualcomm.

I find this crazy though that the cell companies "have to" cut us short
in bandwidth on our calls at the same time they seem to be offering
more and more features that consume plenty of bandwidth. Aren't they
starting to transmit TV to mobile phones now? The way I see it, voice
calls are what the phones are really for. The other stuff is just
extra stuff.

FirstHit

"DTC" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news[email protected]...
> Its a simple trade off between voice quality and making service affordable,
> i.e. loading as many user as possible on a channel.

At a certain level I agree and your post is quite informative, but I'd suggest
that the overall profitability of Sprint is not necessarily as strong a
function of "how many users can we squash into a channel?" as one might at
first suspect. For instance, one ...reasonably... straightforward way of
improving sound quality would be to dynamically change bandwidth usage
depending on how 'busy' the cell site was. When you're the only one on it,
everything sound as good if not better than a landline... when the thing is
completely full, it drops back to the very low bit rate vocoders common today.
On _average_, then, voice quality would improve... and (power controlled) CDMA
is, after all, all about 'averages' in that, e.g., the average cell site
capacity (phones scattered more or less randomly around the tower) is
significantly greater than the worst case scenario (everyone standing on the
fringes of the tower's coverage).

A good example of a somewhat similar system that does this and its outcome is
satellite radio in the USA. Sirius dynamically shifts bandwidth around from
channel to channel depending on the instantaneous information content of all
100+ signals they're cramming down a couple channel, whereas XM allocates
bandwidth statically. The result has been that XM receivers are somewhat
cheaper and were somewhat faster to be readily available on the market, where
Sirius (purportedly) ends up with better-sounding audio... on average. :-)

---Joel Kolstad

> I find this crazy though that the cell companies "have to" cut us short
> in bandwidth on our calls at the same time they seem to be offering
> more and more features that consume plenty of bandwidth. Aren't they
> starting to transmit TV to mobile phones now? The way I see it, voice
> calls are what the phones are really for. The other stuff is just
> extra stuff.

That dove tails into what I posted once before. Not positive if it was the
Cingular or AT&T website that had a short, maybe six questions, about what
was importnat to you in a cellphone.

Two questions ere, how important were changable covers and flip vs. non-flip
phone.

Nothing was asked like how important voice quality, not dropping calls, or
battery life was.

Not to sound cynical, but it is a trade off on making a profit. If a carrier
offers a phone that targets, say under 24 year old crowd, and it outsells a
phone with real functionality for a business person by hundred to
one...guess what the new phones will be like.

And I agree...why are carriers so concerend about tethering your phone to a
laptop for internet access when there are pushing really bandwidth intensive
apps like mobile TV. BTW, read an article in a trade magazine about mobile
TV that sounded much like the fluff from the pre-intern boom crash,
describing it as the next "gotta have" killer app.

Cellular service, like low-end computers and the internet have become a
commodity.

FirstHit wrote:
> After seven years of using my Qualcomm QCP-2700 phone, I am going to
> have to buy a new phone. My battery is dying.
>
> I have tried out a number of phones at the Sprint Store. From these
> phones I call home and leave a message on my answering machine. While
> I'm there, I also call from my present QCP-2700. In every case, I find
> when I get home that my words are much clearer coming from my old 1998
> phone.
>
> What gives? I would think that with advances in technology that the
> newer phones would be better. Not so! I hate to give up my old
> clunker if I have to give up the quality I'm getting now.
>
> Your comments would be appreciated.
>
> FirstHit

Have you tried the LG PM 125 or 225? They have very good sound
compared to many of today's phones.

[email protected] wrote:
> FirstHit wrote:
> > After seven years of using my Qualcomm QCP-2700 phone, I am going to
> > have to buy a new phone. My battery is dying.
> >
> > I have tried out a number of phones at the Sprint Store. From these
> > phones I call home and leave a message on my answering machine. While
> > I'm there, I also call from my present QCP-2700. In every case, I find
> > when I get home that my words are much clearer coming from my old 1998
> > phone.
> >
> > What gives? I would think that with advances in technology that the
> > newer phones would be better. Not so! I hate to give up my old
> > clunker if I have to give up the quality I'm getting now.
> >
> > Your comments would be appreciated.
> >
> > FirstHit
>
> Have you tried the LG PM 125 or 225? They have very good sound
> compared to many of today's phones.

I did try the LG 125. It was better than the Samsungs. It competes
well with today's phones, but with the 3rd-generation protocol, it
doesn't have the clarity of my old Qualcomm.

FirstHit