For the past several weeks I've sort of been a little annoyed with my 8700c. As a BlackBerry, it works great. The phone is a slightly different story.
Several people have complained to me that they can't hear me when I use the BB as a phone while walking down the street. They say there is too much background noise and that they can't hear me, so I wind up shouting into the BB just so they can hear me. On top of that, it seems that when there is a lot of background noise, the earpiece volume does not get loud enough, so now I can't hear them telling me they can't hear me...which leads to some sort of high tech Abbot and Costello routine.
I sort of shrugged it off the first few times I got complaints, but the complaints kept coming. And then it happened at the worst possible time...I was five minutes late meeting my mother for lunch at a restaurant right near the FDR Drive (highway on the East side of Manhattan). I was walking under the drive, right next to the East River, and I called her to tell her I was going to be a few minutes late. She could not hear me at all due to the traffic 20 feet above me. This led to an unbelievable nag session that lasted the rest of the meal about me not only being late, but me not having a good phone, and what if there was an emergency, etc. (no need to go into the gory details here).
It was after this that I decided to do a few tests. I took my 8700c and stood on a busy street corner with buses going by all the time, horns honking, people walking & talking, etc. and called a friend of mine and my work voicemail. After a few minutes of that, I switched to the RAZR (both on Cingular) and performed the same calls. The difference was night and day. The RAZR either has a noise-canceling mic, is much less sensative, or it has a much better algorithm for deciding what is voice and what is background noise.
This prompted a second test. I took my 8700c, my RAZR, a colleague's 8700g on Cingular, and another colleague's 8700g on T-Mo into my computer room at work (think multiple loud air conditioners) and stood in the same spot and made several different calls (it's quite cold in there, btw). All of the 8700's sounded like I was in the middle of an airport with a plane taking off right next to me. I could barely hear the other party, and they could barely hear me. The RAZR was just fine...they could tell I was in a noisy environment, but the noise was not taking away from my voice, and I had no issue hearing them.
For the final test, I took my 8700c and used various software revisions (stock Cing, Bharti, Telstra, 8707v) and made the same call from the computer room from the same spot. There really wasn't a noticeable difference.
Obviously I have tried different devices on different software versions on different carriers, and since I'm not the only one with this issue (several of my users have complained too), I can safely say this is not unique to me, and I assume others out there are having the same issue.
I guess at this point, my only question is, does anyone know if there is a way to fix this? Is there a way to force the codec to use a less sensative setting, or the mic, or something else?
Looks like my RAZR will be out of retirement soon and I'll be back to two devices hanging off my belt again.
