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Comment by dmlorenzetti | Hacker News Reader

It always astounds me how many reviews of "phones" fail to mention phone-like qualities such as reception and ability of the mic to filter out background noise. These are all I care about when choosing a phone. Yet you can find 10-page reviews of phones in which nothing discussed would lead you to understand it's a phone.

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They just cater to the audience, I suppose. The call features are a rather minor feature for many people nowadays -- I checked my call log, and it was 11 incoming+outgoing calls within the last 30 days.

It'll change if/when you have kids. You'll probably have a half-dozen calls a day coordinating things. And having a high quality connection for those calls is really important.

> It'll change if/when you have kids. You'll probably have a half-dozen calls a day coordinating things.

So much organising is done over WhatsApp nowadays that we have an old Samsung phone just to run that app, with only appropriate contacts loaded.

I'm not a fan of proprietary messaging but I can see that it is a lot more efficient for organisers than making a call to every parent.

I don't recall having made a voice call on it in months.

Hold on.......you can use smartphones to call people!?!?!

There seems to be more than a few of us for whom phone functionality is the least useful or used feature of our pocket computer. Meat-space happens in real-time, phone interactions are mostly asynchronous in my case (SMS, chats, etc). Mapping, notes, calendars/reminders, search and of course photos are used a lot more. But yes, in the occasion of actually needing a phone call it sure is annoying when your device can barely handle it.

There is a certain absurdity to it when I watch my friend trying to get the voice recognition to write a whatsapp message (over the handsfree system) while driving, when phoning would clearly make more sense. The voice recognition doesn't appear to work very well.

I basically never use the traditional phone features of my "phone" if I can avoid it. Talking on the phone is boring because voice is a synchronous protocol with low information density. I'd rather spend a few seconds every few minutes typing something back and forth so I can keep doing something interesting while information exchange happens in the background. If I'm going to spend the time it takes to talk with someone, I'd rather do it in person, where it is a rewarding social activity.

So I imagine those reviews of phones are simply written for people more like me than like you.

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