Hacker News Reader

Comment by filleduchaos | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about the author but for me it's not about headphones/being handsfree, it's the fact that the majority of phones and networks right now cannot handle both a voice and a data connection at the same time.

There's few things more quietly annoying than having something (internet-reliant) that I was doing be interrupted by a non-VoIP call, especially when it's someone I wasn't expecting a call from.

View on HN

It's a lot of both and then some:

- Phone-to-head maps poorly to using-phone-as-reference (addresses, maps, calendar, notes)

- Even with speaker, headphones, earbuds, earpiece, etc., toggling between various apps is fraught.

- The mapping of functionality between digital and paper formats ... varies. Digital most definitely does some things far better (search most especially). Others ... not so much. Arguing that digital is an unambiguous advance ... is simply false.

. The device OS may decide it wants to kill specific applications at any time, without notice, or apparent consideration as to significance.

- My office desk phone never stole my contacts, or personal diary, from my rolodex / paper notebook, either while I was on a call or when it was left unattended. (I'm rather surprised nobody's picked up on this particular element of the piece and discussion.)

- Paper gives working area. A desktop is 30 or so times the size of a sheet of A4. My 9" tablet is larger than even today's "phablet" phones ... but has only the display area of two 4x6 index cards. Paper stacks, shuffles, and turns right-angles (e.g., cross-stack sheets portrait then landscape to create divisions) in ways that digital docs don't. If I sort paper in a given order, it doesn't periodically go off and decide it would rather be sorted differently. Yes, the total data density is low. But the real access, input, output, and processing bottleneck isn't the paper, it's the human interacting with it.

I may have heard of headphones at some point. I'm checking my notes.

Interesting- I haven't experienced that issue for about 10 years- I've no idea if 'the majority of phones and networks' still have that problem though.

I own a Pixel 3. Take from that information what you will.

A lot of modern handsets are multi-mode and can switch between CDMA and GSM once unlocked. But yeah ultimately comes down to needing to select a GSM carrier.

I own a Pixel 3. Is that now considered an ancient handset?

It’s more about the network than the phone.

My Pixel 3 can do simultaneous voice and data, because it’s in Australia connecting to GSM based networks.

If it were connecting through CDMA, it could not. CDMA has always been the minority worldwide[0], and is phasing out completely with 4G.

If you’re on a CDMA-using carrier (Eg Verizon) but usually have 4G coverage, you should be able to get simultaneous voice+data by enabling ‘advanced calling’ in the phone’s mobile network settings.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_s...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com