True cell phone performance is the question
Jan 23 '04
The Bottom Line Discover which phones are reliable by asking your friends, especially any electronic engineers. Require true phone performance information from the dealer. Rigorously test and immediately return underperforming phones.
It's very surprising that nobody is questioning or reviewing the true performance characteristics of cell phones. A few years ago Consumer Reports did performance testing in an engineering laboratory on a variety of cell phones and proved there are significant differences in the ability of various models to establish and maintain a phone call. Interestingly, the mode that establishes a call is different from the mode that maintains a call, so you may have a phone that rings or dials out OK and then drops the call as soon as it is answered.
True performance seems to be a closely guarded secret in the industry. Cell phone sales people will insist that all phones perform equally when making, receiving, or maintaining phone calls. They are either ignorant or lying.
I've had 6 cell phones in the last 10 years, always with Verizon and always in San Diego. My old Qualcomm Q-phone and my current Motorola StarTac have been far superior to all the other phones I've owned in their ability to make and maintain a call. I am constantly handing my StarTac to friends who are unable to make a call from our current location.
Recently I performed an informal test which compared my Motorola Startac to the Motorola 120e. I have three family members who all own the 120e, using Verizon Wireless. In an area where all phones showed 3 antenna strength bars out of 5, and using a landline, I dialed all three of the 120es and my StarTac 50 times apiece, just to see if they would ring. My StarTac rang all 50 times. The 120es did not ring an average of 15 times each, that's a 30% failure rate in connections. One of the 120es was replaced under warranty for this same complaint, and the new one behaves in exactly the same way. I proceeded to dial the landline from each of the phones. The StarTac made the phone ring all 50 times, but the 120es were unsuccessful in ringing the landline about 10% of the time.
Untested is the ability of the 120es to maintain a call. However, the owners of the 120es are constantly complaining about dropped calls, and I can confirm this as they have dropped calls with me while I was phoning them. On the other hand, I rarely drop a call to landlines from my StarTac.
You may be able to do some informal testing on your phone, by dialing it multiple times from a landline just to see how often it rings. I'd suggest you do this within a few days of getting a new phone, while it's still under warranty. If your phone is in an area with good signal strength, it should ring at least 95% of the time, and don't let salespeople or store managers tell you anything different when you return the phone. If the replacement phone behaves the same way, then you need to try a different model.
Since cell phone retailers refuse to provide any information regarding the true performance of individual phone models, you should not buy a phone or enter into a 1-2 year contract without insisting on the right to return the phone and exchange it for other phones as often as necessary until you find the phone that truly performs well in it's basic function, which is sending and receiving phone calls with no drops. Question your friends with cell phones and eliminate phones which are reported as unreliable. Remember, you'll be stuck with whatever you buy for 1 or 2 years, an eternity of bad phone service.
Don't let the salespeople distract you with all the features of the phone such as games, PIMs, polyphonic ring tones, cameras, and so on. These add nothing to the true purpose of the phone. Insist on the phone with the best performance as a phone, and by the way - that's not necessarily the most expensive phone they've got!
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