[Discuss] how much can i use a smartphone as a computer?

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 09/09/2015 06:19 PM, Mike Small wrote:
> And what about the talking, meaning the voice quality? I'm finding 
> numerous people lately have cellphones with horrible voice quality.

In the past my wife has occasionally complained about my voice call 
quality hurting her ears. I never pinned it down but I suspect it was 
unfortunate concatenating of codecs: each adding its own distortions, 
sometimes a combination comes up where high-frequency artifacts from one 
codec snowball in the next. For a long time I have had the theory that 
phones want to please their owners and so will choose impair the 
outbound quality in preference to impairing the inbound quality--though 
I have no knowledge of how that might really work in specific protocols 
in use.

Recently I have noticed a couple calls from my brother having a muffled 
quality, so much that I thought he was covering the mouthpiece, but he 
wasn't. I think there was a radio signal problem, providing fewer bits 
for the connection, so his iphone was severely cutting the 
bandwidth-hungry high frequency components rather than drop the call. It 
didn't hurt my ears, but it was hard to understand him.

So I think voice call quality is impaired by (a) radio problems leading 
to bandwidth problems sometimes compounded with (b) unhappy combinations 
of. To the extent people are on an upgrade treadmill and have newer 
phones, and to the extent the call crosses fewer disparate 
encode-decode-encode steps, the better.

Mostly wireless call quality seems better than I remember. But that 
might be my not talking on the phone as much as I used to.

-kb