iPhone actually good at making calls shock

Muted

My ONLY problem with the iphone, as a phone, is a bit of a "DUH has anyone ever used this as a phone"

Speaker phone - fantastic, but put it to your ear as a normal phone and soon you find your ear touches the mute zone on the touch-screen and wham! "hello, hello you there? Grrrrrrrrrrr

Why Apple don't make it a two touch zone or double tap I dunno because I don't have jumbo ears!

Testing is rushed shocker

> The testing divisions are under huge pressure to do their work quickly.

This is true of any in-house testing division anywhere. I used to work for a well-known (now bust) PC assembler on Quality Control. PCs built by our well trained staff were given a quick once over by me before being sent on for case stickers and optional software installing. 200 a day. Minimum. That is, less than 90 seconds to check everything, including "is this component actually here", "are all the screws/cables fitted", and importantly "are all the fans actually plugged in"

Little wonder they went under then. Name deliberately left out, because the beancounters sold the company name to some new people who are still trading with it.

Smartphones

Handover is ok on the HTC's I've had, TYTN, TYTNII, Diamond and Touch HD, all running windows mobile 6+ and all from orange.

Do have niggles with "you have missed a call". when the phone never rang.

And which dimbo at HTC introduced an iphone like "slide to answer bar" with the "mute" bar directly underneath it. How many calls have I muted grrrr. Stick to pressing the answer button now.. and waiting 6 or seven seconds..

@Grumpytom

"My ONLY problem with the iphone, [...] put it to your ear as a normal phone and soon you find your ear touches the mute zone on the touch-screen and wham! "hello, hello you there? Grrrrrrrrrrr"

This doesn't happen on any iPhone I've ever seen... the iPhone touch screen is disabled during a call, when the phone is lifted to your ear, so the mute button CAN'T be pressed. You can also press the lock button to lock the screen during a call (this doesn't disconnect the caller), which would completely eliminate the problem even if it did exist.

Perhaps the question is, have YOU ever used the iPhone as a phone???

What was the network config?

Only trouble with test results like this is they don't consider each operators network configurations. Which by their very nature is a unique mix of various infrasture manufacturers. Hence why each operator has its own in house testing and customised software to give best performance when the mobile is used on their own network.

In 'general' I would say Sony/Ericsson and Nokia are the kings of interoperability. Way down the list would be Apple, RIM due to smaller engineering budgets and limited test capabilities.

Oh yes, network config

Anonymous Coward has asked important question - what network was used for test and were conditions exactly the same (or at least similar) to test all handsets? Very often the case is that not only terminals are bad - networks are too.

Andy Wat

"The fact that the Blackberry isn't doesn't surprise me one bit - american trash, plastic crap, god-awful UI - why should the protocol stack be anything other than cack as well?"

Er, RIM are Canadian. If you're going to make xenophobic rants, at least get the country right.

@Niggles with missed calls

Don't think that's due to the hardware.

WinMo might have a lot of problems but it's biggest is how it manages answering of calls. Because the phone app isn't high priority enough, it regularly took longer than 4-6 rings (i.e., the time it takes to go to voicemail) for the phone to wake up and start registering user input.

Worse still on the TytnII, if the phone's in keyboard out (tilted) mode and attached to a charger, the act of unplugging it and snapping the device shut and then answering the call resulted in a missed call *every* time because WinMo was unable to handle the switch from landscape->portrait without effectively hanging the device. By the time CPU cycles were available the call had long been missed.

Mind you, I've also heard of friends with the iPhone who've missed calls because the the CPU has been tied up by the active app to the point where the slide-2-unlock won't respond to user input, so they're not immune either.

Android seems good so far, but I don't get that many calls (and don't usually want to speak to people anyway).

@ grumpy tom

Come on, admit it, you dont have an iphone do you, you are inferring that you would brush the mute button with your ear aren't you, or recounting a tale that a mate of your wife's aunty heard from one of her freind's.

I use my iPhone as a phone al the time and I would disagree with you completley, the speaker is SHITE, I dislike the tinny, awful quality but as a phone, I answer and talk then hang up, I have NEVER accidentaly muted a call.

I have however accidentaly knocked the "Mute" button on the side near the volume buttons which meant I missed calls because I couldnt hear the thing ringing (but then I do have big fat sausage fingers, not your usual Apple demographic stick thin geek type!)

It's a phone FFS, if you dont like it get a different phone. Far more worrying is the news that every iPhone in the world is about to be hacked by a simple text message!

http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/article.html?Text_message_hackers_could_hijack_every_iPhone&in_article_id=711927&in_page_id=150

Have some sympathy for terminal vendors

Our experience is that radio performance varies significantly across manufacturers and across each manufacturers terminal platform. You need to reflect on how much is going on in real-time within a terminal and have some sympathy with vendors. One one hand, the industry is asking for ever increasing functionality but at the same time not funding the extra bells and whistles that vendors are putting into their phones. The problem with smartphones is that they still have feature phone type batteries and radios whilst at the same time have large bright colour LCDs and a reasons for people to keep the radios switched on i.e. data. I suggest the characteristics reported in this article relate to the way in which the baseband radio is programmed to behave. Significant power savings can and are made by devices like the iPhone simply by taking acceptible shortcuts in the use of radio signalling. What do you want? Features, convenience and good radio performance with rapidly depleating batteries or be able to make calls all day? You can't have both!

I assume...

... all the anti-iphone lot who always say "I just want a phone that can be used as a phone" will immediately run out and buy an iPhone now... no???... didn't think so.

Until the bugs are fixed from firmware 3.0 I'm not planning on continuing with my iPhone past my contract ending.. infact I may pay to leave if things arn't fixed within the next month or two. :(

Re: Re: And what about the C905

This differs from my experience with the C905. Reception on mine is not as good as previous Sony Ericsson feature phones. It's one of the worst performers I've had. If I carry my phone in my pocket then I get little or no network coverage; when the phone is just sitting on the desk the signal is all over the place. This in areas where I used to get good coverage on older phones.

Where's the actual *making calls* part?

Having used a number of touch-screen only phones... they all suck horribly at making calls (i.e. dialing the actual number numbers). Compare initiating a call while driving in a noisy car, walking, trying to do just about anything else at the same time, it's the most annoying thing ever. The fact that everything is visual drove me away from them, not just calling but any other task you might be trying to do.

Now test against a Nokia 3310

Ok it doesn't do 3g but the other tests would be interesting.

So what happened with the SE C905???? Huh? Why mention it then ignore it El Reg?

Bloody fanbois.

@Grumptytom

My wife does this all the time, I've never done it. Not sure if it's her phone or her ear, but I think what's happening is the proximity sensor hasn't registered the ear. It's an inch or so above the mute button, so maybe between how you hold it and the shape of your ear?

C905

@Mad as a Bat - in my experience the C905 signal meter means diddley squat - often it's displaying zero bars, but paired with an "H" and the web browsing and phone calls work just fine - yet anything less that two bars on GSM and it's unusable.

Seams to hold connection to the network well (gets just about usable signal in the lounge unlike any other Sony Ericsson/Sony handset I have had - and unlike my housemate's Nokia) - certainly enough to answer the phone and walk into the garden! (Mind you if it wasn't for the local NIMBY's that wouldn't be a concern.)

Woops! Oh, and network config...

"Er, RIM are Canadian. If you're going to make xenophobic rants, at least get the country right."

D'oh. That'll teach me to go off on one without researching. I thought Canada would make better stuff - I do stand by my thoughts on RIM products. I've never been a RIMmer. chuckle...

BTW, I think Voda use all-Ericsson network infrastructure - their single-vendor approach has, in my opinion, meant less of the embarassments like the one we've seen with O2 recently. Certainly, when I was testing 2G/3G handovers, Voda's network was always better than O2s across a range of reference handsets.

No mention of Moto here, I see... probably best.

@Jessica Werkz

it wins "awards" from fashionistas and techie wanting an invite to the next Apple gig so they can be seen to be cool.

Actually, since playing with others iphones i have become more impressed, the fascist and restrictive call plans are what put me off for the moment, and....

....once iphone users have stopped showing how cool Crash Bandicoot, ibeer, itube, web browsing and how nice the UI is, they do concede whilst hanging out the office window that call reception etc isnt actaully that good. Still, at least now with verison 3 of the OS they can send MMS.

@Jessica

>>Bearing in mind how often the iPhone wins awards for being the best mobile phone then why was it unexpected?

Usually when Apple stuff wins awards its for looking nice on the desk/shelf/armband, not for actually having good performance or technical features.

Maybe they should try the iPhone with 3.0

Since the upgrade I've had no end of hassles when making phone calls most noticeably calls either dropping or me sounds like a robot to the person at the other end of the line.

No Kidding

Who would have guessed the iPhone would be so remarkable at handling phone calls?