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Comment by Guildpact | Hacker News Reader

The StarTac was a legend of a phone. It was good at calling, getting reception, volume, and quality. My dad held onto his for as long as possible before being forced to switch to a smart phone.

Smart phones compensate for lower call quality and reception with their processors and apps, there is always going to be a tradeoff, to most it is worth it but if your business relies on a lot of phone calls and being able to take those calls wherever you are then having something like the StarTac is great.

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I have to disagree to some extent. The call quality on the StarTAC was horrid - it sounded like it was sampled at around 2kHz most of the time. (And to be fair all other cell phones sounded the same at the time.)

When calling on my iPhone the call quality is significantly higher in many cases. I'm not sure if it requires both callers to be on an iPhone or on the same carrier or what. But sometimes the calls are as good as the audio coming from the Music app. Other times, they sound like StarTAC calls. But something has definitely changed in the last few years for certain types of calls. (And I've found FaceTime audio calls are always high quality audio.)

VoLTE has gained the option of using a higher bitrate codec than has been in use since the early GSM days. And the GSM bitrate and codec was chosen to pack as many voice calls as possible into the bandwidth of the GSM protocol.

That said, if it is iPhone to iPhone, it may well be that the call never touch the carrier systems and instead happens over iMessage for all i know.

> That said, if it is iPhone to iPhone, it may well be that the call never touch the carrier systems and instead happens over iMessage for all i know.

That would only happen if you are using Facetime Audio

Do you have to opt in on every call, or will it happen automatically as with messages?

True. My friend is a VP of some construction big-co and relies heavily on his phone. The StarTac would survive the most hostile environments without much issue. iPhones? Well, he has gone through about a dozen in spite of him using the expensive covers (otter).

My StarTac did actually detach at the flip sometime in 2001. Still usable for months after, though. If I recall, there was just some sort of bus cable between the two pieces. I would have to hold them next to each other to make calls.

It is truly depressing how the idea of a SIM card holding storage as well (your contacts!) didn't get bigger.

It'd be awesome if my sim card ( or something the size of the old simcards ) had as much storage as it could manage. With today's microSD densities, you can realistically hold everything and more than what's on your phone (though the storage medium itself is less resilient..).

Then you go to work, pop it in your hardcore resilient phone. Go home, pop it in your tablet. This however empowers users almost exclusively, there isn't much advantage to a consortium of companies implementing this.

Yes! With the size of MicroSD cards these days it would seem straightforward to build a sim/sd card combo.

I have had an iPhone since they came out in the UK in 2007, and I love being able to check my email and idly browse the web on it (I don't much care about apps, I'll be honest).

But, to be honest, I quite miss my Nokia 3210 which had fantastic battery life, never dropped calls, got reception in places my iPhone never does, and never, ever spent ages trying to send an iMessage instead of an SMS when there's a really bad 3G or 2.5G signal (which frustrates me almost to the point of violence).

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