I cannot read the article due to the paywall, but just to vent.....one painful phone pet peeve for me that's declined recently is the art of people leaving a useful voice mail.
Ok, I get it. There's a few technically-challenged people that struggle with emails and texts and prefer to use their voice. I'm perfectly happy to deal with that.
But they call and leave a voice mail that focuses on the wrong information. They'll agonizingly slowly spell out their first and last name (D-as-in-dog, E-as-in-elephant, etc) and phone number (even though any digital system provides that already) but not even mention what they're calling for.
What should be a 15 second voice mail like "Hey Mark, this is Denise from the Jersey office. Please send Rachel in sales the paperwork for order #9485. Let me know if there's any problems with that. Thanks!" turns into a 2 minute long voicemail that is physically painful to listen to and that ignores the only necessary piece of information required and turns into an unnecessary game of phone tag.
I think it is because you want an acknowledgement that the recipient listened to your voicemail and will follow through. Without them calling back you will be in the dark. Also, for cases like exemplified with, email is probably better. Calling to talk is for more complex stuff that requires a conversation.
My previous post was lighthearted, but I have had problems with voice-to-text in noisy cars. I suppose there’s a chance this issue be carried over to the receiver’s voice-to-text software.
Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People” has an anecdote about him writing that as kid to some person he wanted to impress, and it predictably having the opposite effect.
When I can tell Google voice is messing up what I'm saying I'll end with dictated not read. I got it from the Simpsons. Only a few people get the joke. What's funny is I use it for important communications and people I need to respond to not than others
turns into a 2 minute long voicemail that is physically painful to listen to
Not like it's any less painful on a live call. I wish I had a setting to automatically tase anyone who calls me and when I answer the first thing they want to know is what I'm doing. As if it's up to them to judge whether what I'm doing is more important than whatever bullshit they've called me up for. You tell me what you need and then I will tell you if and when I can do it. Sooner or later I'm going to start answering these people honestly. "Oh, nothing much Sharon, just browsing some naked anime women."
I use sipgate. They transcribe every voicemail into an email with mp3 attachment. That makes it easy for me to just email people a reply to their phone call.
> and phone number (even though any digital system provides that already
Speaking of which, when I call any customer service, they ALWAYS ask for my phone number. I've been baffled by this for awhile. Why? Can't they see it?
I wonder if caller information is just unreliable enough that they always ask anyway, because even if it gives the wrong number a smallish percent of the time, that's bad enough that it's worth taking the time to ask.
Being forced to convey things like addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, etc by voice instead of text can be incredibly painful, and of course it gets worse with poor quality connections, accents, non-native languages, etc.
I almost wish there was some low-tech thing for sending text in-band in voice calls, like DTMF but for all ASCII characters, or some 75 baud protocol / tones so you could be like 'Ok, I am sending my name / email / account #. <sending> See it on your screen? great! screencap it... copy and paste it into your app now, etc!'
Hell, I'm not even that old (41), and we had a rotary phone until 1988 or so. We also had a touch-tone cordless phone, but the corded phone in the kitchen was still rotary.
I expect there are even younger people than I who used rotary phones as kids.
That would depend on the country, yet I'd consider late 30s to be the age.
Also I am using the phone daily to call anyone - family, coworkers. It'd appear, around here, the ear buds have not caught up.
Some can, many won't. Eye sight and dexterity problems have a lot to do with this. When you can't see and your hands shake it's a lot easier to just "hey google call so-and-so."
Also even those of us who don’t ca that much, do receive calls since some entities still prefer to call you (government, medical, education). It’s either that or snail mail - despite the fact that most of them have my email address.
Like many comments in this site, this is very US centric. Where I live (in Europe) no government entity calls anyone. They might send an SMS as confirmation or notification, but formal communications are sent electronically. Nobody under the age of about 45 calls on the phone as a regular matter.
> I thought only old people still do phone calls for private communication.
FTFY
Just yesterday I received spam call, my only response was answering with "Yes?", then when they started to talk about something I just hang up without a word, they wasted enough of my time and energy. Private matter I communicate 100% through IM or video calls within IM, it must be very rare ocassion that my retired father calls me on the phone or that I have to call wife because she is not responding to IM.
compared to the myriad of ads plastered everywhere. I suppose the latter has just been normalized - yet the amount of 'energy' (as in joules; or as in human frustration) is unparalleled compared to the one spent on unwanted calls, or just calls.
Can confirm. From Germany, have the same number for 15+ years, basically any provider has this number and probably leaked it at some time. Still no spam at all. I think there are heavy penalties for that in Germany.
In the Czech Republic I get like one spam call per year, and it’s usually semi-relevant (carrier, bank, insurance), virtually zero scams or blind marketing calls.
Same phone number for 17 years, dozens and dozens of companies have seen it.
I bought a SIM in Brazil a few years ago and was bombarded with text spam within minutes of putting the card into my phone, most of it from the carrier.
Maybe we need to unbundle the phone again. Maybe "a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device" isn't what we need in a single device after all...
It is definitely what I need, and I don’t think I am alone. Phone calls are such a minor functionality of these devices. If we do that, that will be the death of the phone as quite a lot of people won’t bother carrying a second device, or give up on their pocket computer.
Because phones aren't allowed to have bezels anymore for some reason, I'm constantly hanging up on people because there's no room for a proximity sensor to turn off the screen so my cheek presses the "hang up" button. It tries to use the front camera as a makeshift sensor, but it doesn't work very well.
Recently I reacted with incredulity when the people on the other end could properly hear me through a newly-connected Bluetooth device -- it's more jarring to me when this stuff doesn't fail.
That's not problem of a bezel, but either crappy software or bad sensor, never happened to me through 11+ years of using Android phones with touch screen.
Better choose decent phone next time, mind sharing what phone causes you this trouble?
Samsung Galaxy S10e (with recent software). It wasn't cheap. And all my previous Android phones were fine too, but this one only has the little hole in the screen for the camera. There is no sensor.
I know it's not using a proximity sensor because the front camera turns on when it's trying to fake-proximity-sense. I also know what a proximity sensor looks like (I've worked with such sensors for my job), and there isn't one. It's just a bad design; form overrode function.
S10 series should have under screen proximity sensor, so there is no way for you to see it unless it lights up during function, it's white flashing LED
I do sympathize with users who have to distinguish between the kind of brokenness that warrants returning the phone, and the kind of brokenness which is simply the norm in this space.
Not sure if the device really is the issue here. I've the same phone, it costed me $600 when I bought it 3.5 years back. And till date, it's the best phone I've owned: not too big, headphone jack, expendable storage, physical dual sim, capable cameras and Touch ID that's located just right. Importantly, I've never had issues that you mentioned (dropped calls or Bluetooth glitches for that matter)
I use this phone (S10e) every single day for calls and music etc. In fact, I'm typing my response on it now
What I mean to say is - there's a very high chance that your device is broken.
You may be using different software version, maybe they fixed it. It was very popular model, I really doubt if it had such serious issues it would not be fixed.
But considering not all people have this problem it's either software error, software setting or some batches had hardware issue or they fixed the design.
The point is parent's generalization is wrong because it's either caused by faulty hardware or software issue, but it's not widespread problem across all new (Android) smartphones, just because you and him experience this issue.
Also just throwing my hat into the ring, writing this on a S10e. It's not perfect, but I don't have any issues with the sensors, no ads, and it generally just works about as well as any other phone I've used.
S10e definitely has a hw proximity sensor under the screen, but Samsung also adds infos from touchscreen to complement this sensor. I used a s10e and loved it, but not on Samsung sw and I never did calls so I can't say much about it.
Circa 2012, top 60% of an Android call screen was unresponsive to touch and never had phantom touches. As the buttons creeped upward, I get phantom mute, hold and even hangups.
My father's phone had the same problem (some HTC abomination), but with the mute button rather than the end call button. I'm not sure if it was due to cheek contact with the screen or some gyro sensor thinking that the phone was flipped upside down, but during a call the phone would randomly mute its microphone.
Same happens to me with the mute button. It also seems hard on newer phones to find a position where the speaker is clear - shift it by a millimetre and now you can’t hear anything. The phone is so big that holding it completely still for a long call is uncomfortable. People ask why everyone holds the phone out and uses the loudspeaker now, well…
Worse yet, the "muted" and "not muted" states of the button are visually distinct when looking at them side-by-side, but if you just see one in isolation, you'd be hard-pressed to determine which it is. Gotta poke it a few times to see it change, you know?
Yes. It is either Hang up, Mute, or Worst, suddenly on speaker phone so the sound would blow up my ear.
There are many other aspect of "calling" that has gotten worst, including call quality, codec and signal etc. My thinking is that no one calls anymore and no one gives a damn about phone calling.
I still remember I used to buy Motorola Phone just because of their Crystal talk.
Personally I think it was two things reinforcing each other:
On one side, a natural decline in people using the phone (replaced by texting/apps)
On the other side: the cell companies no longer “encumbered” by laws around landline reliability, cramming ever more phone calls in to the same amount of bandwidth
The cell companies could have the clearest call quality by a wide margin, if they chose to. TBH, (and I know I’m an outlier) even though I talk to people for maybe 5 hours a month, I would still switch providers to one that offered call a quality equivalent to being in person
> suddenly on speaker phone so the sound would blow up my ear.
This being so bad is a phone design issue that goes beyond the touchscreen.
Well designed phones have two microphones and speakers, so when in speakerphone the top becomes the mic and the bottom the speaker, preventing deafening people in the event of an accidental switch.
Often it’s the wireless earbuds, which won’t reconnect or are connected to the wrong device.
More often the fact that no matter how much a reviewer praised your earbuds' call quality, it's total shite and the person on the other end of the line will ask if you're in a car or using speakerphone.
Not sure if it’s because I have a big head or mumble but nobody can hear me clearly on AirPods. It’s fine with wired headphones where I tend to hold the mic in position more. It’s annoying because AirPods are great apart from that.
“Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it.”
This has never happened to me - using either wired headphones or AirPods which connect rather seamlessly to the phone even mid-call. Just get headphones that work well with your phone’s model.
The whole article sounds very “millennials discover telephony” to me - either that or the author is in way over their head and don’t really know how to use the smorgasbord of devices they appear to have maneuvered themselves into.
AirPods aren’t that seamless for me. The switching between phone and MacBook is pretty good, but there is still an element of randomness if the phone will connect to the AirPods or not.
Add in a few more switches such as in the car or a Bluetooth speaker and the article rings true for me.
That's (a) hard to believe and (b) in the minority if true. I think this stuff works so poorly all the time that some get accustomed to it or some are just lucky. I had it happen on my desktop computer and the monitor's audio today because the audio device got confused after a Remote Desktop session. There wasn't even a wireless connection involved. I had to run to get wired headphones.
If anything, in my experience, it is service providers' cell coverage and cell reception on phones barely designed to be phones that are all so abysmal that it doesn't even matter if everything else works well. They alone make cellphones terrible as phones when on cellular.
And in general, BlueTooth sucks. I need to do an incantation to keep my PS4 controllers connected, a problem reported by many in various forums.
Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails.
It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email.
It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail.
The subject line takes only 15 seconds to write but will significantly reduce receiver anxiety, both synchronously and asynchronously. Sending a text after the call is not the same because it’s not in context.
I remember proposing this to WhatsApp while I was working at FB but the WhatsApp culture seemed uninterested in feature ideas of any kind. Hopefully someone else does it eventually.
"It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail."
Well, what is stopping your wife from also texting you, if it was something important and she did not reach you? And what would force her, to use a potential subject line?
Otherwise it is an interesting idea, but I doubt it will be a killer feature, as most would simply ignore it.
I think the problem there is that a lot of people just won't bother. Some people would just put "pick up" on that subject line, or leave it empty (surely you wouldn't make it mandatory, nobody would accept that), or any number of things.
I personally hate unscheduled calls, and I'd love it if everyone sent a text first to check if you're free for a call, and only call after you've accepted, but... that's just never gonna happen.
I like the idea, but it will never take off. People are fundamentally lazy when it comes to these things. Look at the surging popularity of voice messages in some circles, shifting the burden of communication fully to the receiver. Even if you had the feature, I'd wager most subject lines would stay empty, or just contain the bare minimum like "hi".
But if other people are lazy, why would I entertain interruptions from them? I generally don’t do any work voice or video calls because, simply, they are an interruption. So they need to have an agenda and be scheduled. And indeed, I do not listen to voice messages; type it out or don’t send it at all.
That’s ok. Metadata improves context but isn’t mandatory. Some people want it, others don’t bother.
It’s like sending a calendar invite. Sure, you can send an invite with nothing but your email address and a date+time. But many people would find an empty invite a bit rude. It’s just polite to include some context about the meeting. The phone call should evolve in that direction.
If it's not mandatory, then what's the point? You can already send text messages if the message is important. And since it's optional, both spammers and your lazy family will leave it blank making it useless to filter out spam.
It doesn't have to be a burden. My watch already provides me a quick-select list of responses. So when I make a call, instead of one generic send button, how about two? One of them labeled "this is a emergency" or something like that. Maybe even a little list of a half dozen of the most commonly used subjects, so I just click the one that matches.
No reason to make people work any harder than they do now.
This feature would be super useful, since nobody I would ever willingly talk to would use it I could dump all calls with subjects to voicemail (and then not check it).
>Besides, how would you handle calls from landlines and such?
Direct to voicemail, of course, with a message saying 'text me' for automatic transcription. As they say, its a feature not a bug [to not be interrupted]. In a perfect world I'd have a secretary or AI to screen calls on my behalf, but I don't.
Ironically, you almost do. Last week I updated my S22 to Android 13, and one of the new features Samsung claims to have implemented[0] is to have Bixby pick the call for you, transcribe what the caller says, and display it on screen, giving you a choice to pick up the call, or type/select a reply that Bixby will then say to the caller. With spam call detection being an established feature for years already, the ingredients for your AI assistant are already there.
Now that I think of it, I might actually try this the next time a telemarketer calls.
----
[0] - I haven't actually tested it, nor seen it in action - just saw it being mentioned when I reviewed "Tips" app after update.
Is there a 5-6 inch pad available? If not, then that's not an alternative, can't shove a 10 inch tablet into my pocket. And while it's called a phone, the primary function for many (dare I say most?) is definitely not doing voice calls, hell my phone app icon isn't even on the homescreen anymore, that's how little I use this device for phone calls and I use it for hours every day otherwise.
Hmm, I was going to get back to you with a list, but it seems most of the 6-inchers have been discontinued. The Amazon Fire 6 would have been the most prominent example.
There are some, but none of them would be suitable for consumer use.
> If you don't want that, wouldn't a pad be a better option than a phone?
1) Do they make devices that aren't phones that are the size of a note"pad"? The smallest non-phone tablet devices are now (with the death of iPod touch) the size of (at best) a small note"book", not a sensibly-sized-for-portable-usage note"pad".
2) That doesn't even solve the problem as tons of Internet-connected messaging software now supports calls, so I feel like you are missing the point in some sense: the person you are responding to is seriously talking about WhatsApp!
>It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function.
No, it's not. You sound like a dinosaur. A phone's primary functions are 1) text-messaging apps, 2) camera, 3) dating apps, 4) banking apps, and various others. Phone calls are somewhere around #20.
Definitely not. It depends on who you and your circle of friends are, of course, but dating apps are definitely way higher usage than phone calls among anyone I know. I use my phone as a phone less than half a dozen times per year. If the phone functionality vanished, I don't think I would mind.
the disconnect is that you're not able to see outside your bubble. Your average iphone or android user is using the phone function far more than dating apps
How do we know who is in a bubble? :) When I walk around downtown, I see hundreds of people on their phones, and maybe one or two of them is actually using it as a phone. Obviously I don't know if they're on dating apps specifically, but they are enormously popular, so it seems plausible.
No, they're not. In the country I'm living in, *no one* uses phone calls except for rare things like delivery people calling because the box doesn't fit in your apartment's delivery boxes. Absolutely no one under the age of 50 uses voice calling to talk to their friends or family; they all use LINE texting.
I haven't taken a phone call in over a month now (from the Amazon delivery guy). I use dating and texting apps every day. For actual talking to friends/family, I use voice and video chat functions in chat apps.
Something on that order, yeah. Looking through my phone's call log, I had a call with a friend in mid-August, and another with another friend in mid-July. Prior to that was a call with my mom in April and that's as far back as the log goes.
Phone = Telephone:
The term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, "far" and φωνή, phōnē, "voice", together meaning "distant voice".
Distant voice communication is the entire purpose for a phone.
Just because you want or expect your phone to do more, doesn’t make your desires the primary function of the device.
And geometry is from the Greek γῆ (gê) 'earth, land', and μέτρον (métron) 'a measure', referring to it's original use as a tool for surveying farm plots in flood plains. It's obviously expanded much past that original definition to the point now that the original definition is simply one small application of the tool. In fact an application that the vast majority of practitioners will never administer.
The way I like to look at it is: Imagine a world where the concept of a phone call never existed. Then, suddenly someone invents an app that:
1. Allows an instant, full-screen foreground takeover over whatever else you are currently doing on the device
2. Rings and vibrates your device
3. Has a button that could allow an unknown person to send and receive audio to and from your device
4. All of this is triggered remotely, from anyone in the world, without any kind of user identification or authentication, besides a spoofable number
No app store's rules in either major ecosystem would allow such an abusive app. Yet, only because the legacy concept of a "phone call" exists, not only is the app allowed, but it's preloaded on every device out there!
The phone feature is a legacy feature that goes away with 2G. Soon carriers will only be moving data.
The providers have data to show that the phone functionality is not a primary use case. It is a legacy product whose overhead has a real cost on our economy.
When do we stop paying $10-$20 a month per lines of service, for the privileging of being interrupted? When do we stop calling it a smartphone and treating as such and recognizing it as as computer, a laptop for your pocket.
I expect those born in the last century to be most resistant to the deprecation of the 'phone call' as a concept. People also reminisced about having phone lines that were partied together. Imagine what scammers would do with that today.
I doubt people from the last century are the ones holding on to the idea of a phone call.
Whatever telcos are doing these days would have led to jail time in the 1990s.
I would like to see a return to the government passing QOS laws for safety critical services, then enforcing them.
Since everyone is dunking on twitter these days: How is it legal for them to slap an auth wall on top of emergency response agencies' feeds? If I MITM'ed the emergency broadcast system with such bullshit, I'd go to jail. Twitter is used during emergencies by at least 100x more people than emergency broadcast.
Unfortunately it kind of fails at being a good pocket computer (all else aside they got rid of the concept of files and replaced it with nothing). The fact that it fails at being a phone too is just adding insult to injury.
As a phone, all cell phones are terrible. In the wired-phone era companies used to advertise on call quality. Nobody does that any more because the quality of cell phone calls is so abysmal that text with (or without frankly) emojis is an order of magnitude better for communication.
If they made pads the size of my phone that could still use cell network internet and that I could put a custom OS on I'd consider it.
People who never experienced a really good connection when no more than a little of the phone & switching network was digitized, surely have no idea what they're missing. I've never once heard a call since that era that was as good—VOIP, Zoom, cell network, modern POTS network, whatever.
t's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function.
Not for about fifteen years or so, no. I don't even have the Phone app on the front page of my iPhone, let alone allow it to sit in the dock. Regardless, whatever the primary function of the device, there is room for improvement over "it's always worked that way".
Phone calls from unknown numbers go straight to voice mail. Same for some people who think it’s fair game to call me and bore my ears off with their life whilst I am working.
Then I add an exception for ______. If they cannot tell you their number (happens with some companies), then they can:
- arrange a call, which is great because then I am guaranteed to have the time to deal with the topic, I do that sometimes with my bank;
- leave a voice mail, which is not great but then I am not responsible for their phone number policy (nobody leaves voice mail anymore);
- send an email (or a SMS, a WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Skype, whatever, I am not picky), possibly to arrange a phone call, also great because I can answer written messages on my own terms and not when they feel like calling me;
- (most of the time these days) have a chat over whatever IM platform they integrated into their website.
My time is not theirs to use however they want. If they want me to be on call, that’s fine, but with compensation.
This is a solution very dependent on individual preferences, though, it is not any kind of blanket solution.
I once called my brother from a phone that was not mine, in the middle of the night, to inform him that our brother had died suddenly. He did not answer. He got that message in the morning when he checked his voicemail after waking up. He was very upset at the delay.
Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.
> I once called my brother from a phone that was not mine, in the middle of the night, to inform him that our brother had died suddenly. He did not answer. He got that message in the morning when he checked his voicemail after waking up. He was very upset at the delay.
Well, sometimes shit happen. I can think of a handful of scenarios where I cannot be contacted and it’s right that sometimes it could be important. But I am not living on alert 24/7 because sometimes someone might die. My filtering system lets the second call through, which I think works fine as most spammers do not call twice within one minute. That said, in the middle of the night I still probably would not hear, but not because of that.
(I am sure that the situation was complex and difficult to manage enough for you to have to borrow a phone, and I do not envy you for having gone through it and am sorry you had to. In that situation I would be very upset regardless of the delay).
> Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.
That’s entirely right and I agree completely. But then we are where we are and the world often disagrees with me. Otherwise I could also get rid of my ads and trackers blockers.
“Receiver anxiety” should crawl off into the forest. It’s a youth-millennial thing that inhibits waaaay too much authentic social action. People are just too scared to be human. Just call me! I might pick up I might not.
For that matter, if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. It’s just e-mail.
My mother had no issues calling someone but her parents were upset when she started listening to that damn rock and roll. The youth thing inhibits way too much authentic music. People are just scared to listen to the oldies. /s
Différent generations have different norms and it’s not right or wrong.
a few generations ago, there was a moral panic that the kids weren’t all right because rock and roll music was corrupting. It was loud, vulgar, etc and therefore wrong.
My point was to emphasize how across generations, everyone seems to think that the youth have bad norms and it’s somehow wrong, and then they grow up and the world keeps spinning, and the cycle repeats.
It’s awfully vain to think that the norms of your generation in your nation at your point in time are magically the ”better” ones.
The parent comment reference a novel idea that phone calls could have a subject line. It’s novel, it’s clever, it would solve many problems beyond just “people are scared to be human”. The world moves on, and we can improve it or we can launch ad hominem attacks on the next generation.
This sort of relativism of all norms, mores, morals, and ethics needs to stop. There are some cultural and social norms/mores that are better than others. We know this, because empirically some produce better outcomes than others. Mass-scale social anxiety at having to interact with another human being is NOT healthy for society, and is likely the underlying cause for a significant amount of the current social ills that are either new or increasing over time.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess 17 year olds who can’t call people aren’t the reason for societies problems. Certainly less to blame than the 45yo’s who bemoan them.
Every generation thought that society was collapsing. Despite that, time progresses, people age out of the population and a new generation is born. And society (mostly) doesn’t collapse.
When I was 17 I spent like an hour emailing a teacher telling her I’d be late on an assignment by a day. Because I was very anxious about writing an email to a “superior” and didn’t know how it’d go, or what the “right” email looked like.
Now I email hundreds of times a day, and have constantly shifted deadlines to no professional detriment. I still get nervous emailing a new important person, but you do it anyways.
Do people really forget what it’s like being young? Sometimes you just grow up and move on.
I don't have a problem with phone calls but if someone unexpected engages with me on the street or in a hallway I kind of freeze for long enough that we have walked past each other and then realize that was a bit rude but its too late now.
I miss a very high percentage of legitimate email messages from people because I don't receive many of them (half a dozen per year?) and get like 20-30 spam and mistyped-address emails per day (that's after the spam filters), so I don't pay much attention to it unless I'm expecting something.
Humans I know contact me through whatsapp. Or if they're old (and hell, I'm almost 40, so I mean old) through text or phone. Strangers' only real hope is text. I'll probably miss anything else. And even that is getting so goddamn spammy now that it's not far from being like email: only useful if I'm already expecting a message. I receive stupid political ads for states I've never lived in a couple times a day.
I read your email, got interrupted, and did not reply. Then I forgot about it.
If you email me again, it might get read at a more convenient time, and I'll answer.
Same reason I might not answer your call: I'm busy with something else or not near my phone at the moment. This used to be normal by the way -- if I called your home phone and nobody answered, I'd have no choice but to call again later.
It isn’t visually present in the list of 50-100 emails in my inbox. Mail again and remind. It’s not rude. It’s rude to assume the other person is ignoring.
> Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails.
Pixel phones have call screening feature. It can be enabled for all calls or unknown callers. It asks the caller to state the reason they are calling and notifies you with the text of the reason given and you can choose whether to accept or reject.
If you want something more then you could just ask callers to text you instead.
I like where you're going with this, and particularly with the increase of video calls, it's still strange to just pick up and see a person.
The flow I get people into is to communicate via text (slack, whatsapp, etc depending on the nature of the environment) with a "hey, is now a good time to call", or "I wanted to discuss XYZ", and we can then hash out the best method for communication.
The authors complaint is valid, but I think it is more of a UX issue, similar to what you're suggesting here.
My golden rules to make videoconferencing more reliable :
- Use ethernet. Wi-Fi isn't reliable, your neighbor's microwave can ruin everything.
- Use wired headphones. 0 latency. 0 connection time. And disables the mic noise-cancelling algos.
- Use classic phone calls when required. It's more robust and latency is even better.
> Wi-Fi isn't reliable, your neighbor's microwave can ruin everything.
Agree that wifi isn't reliable, but not for that reason: microwave ovens haven't been an issue for wifi since most people switched to the 5GHz band, many years ago.
You would be surprised that most wifis out there still don't run on 5ghz. I mean what do you expect from non-technical people, wifi is just this white box that should work, if not turn off/on and then call support. Ie we (Switzerland) have both bands available from the router and till now even I didn't know that higher band is better for interference, and I am most technical in the family/friends circle.
5Ghz also has drawbacks. Routers support both, usually with an option to either combine them and handle the selection automagically or separate them. Parent is just wrong about routers having switched over completely - and thus the microwave can indeed still be a problem.
When you're on speaker, most platforms have a noise cancelling algorithm to prevent Larsen loops between mic and speaker. Using headphones usually disables it.
Wired headphones or nothing. I know they're connected because I can see them physically connected. They're charged because photons can move through wires. It's the right protocol because they fit in the device.
Apple gets props for making it break less often than everyone else but it's a fundamentally broken UI and broken protocol.
Any tips on using ethernet when you're renting a house and unable to wire any infrastructure? My only hookup for internet is in a pretty poor spot for wireless connectivity to my office, but I don't have a good way to wire a cable instead since there's an entire living room, a staircase, a hallway, and multiple doors in the way.
Run cables along baseboards, under rugs, under doors, along the stair runners, etc. If the cable needs to cross an egress point, put a rug over it. If you can convince your landlord, drill a single hole to bridge the upstairs and downstairs. If you're in an older house that has straight cold air returns (not a heating duct), drop a cable through there, and pin it to the crown molding.
Does the house have coax wiring for cable tv? If so, get a pair of MoCA Ethernet adapters. I have 2.5Gbps ones running across a large house and they are rocksolid reliable.
First one doesn't really hold in my opinion, 5GHz WiFi has been available for over a decade and won't be interrupted by a microwave. Probably easier to upgrade to a relatively recent WiFi setup than connecting a cable in most cases.
Oh, I thought it would be something more... interesting.
I have a voice that does not match most people's associations with my name, so the first minute of every phone call is spent explaining myself (sometimes it feels more like justifying). I've been mistaken for phishing attacks and got hung up on a few times too.
This is about local connection problems, audio device with your phone:
>Hello? … Wait, hello? Can you hear me? Okay, hold on. Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it. Okay, never mind, I’ll just hold it up to my head. Hi, ugh, sorry about that.
I can confirm this. However, there is another class of problems, too, which aren't mentioned. Network problems. It is the year 2022 and still in many areas reception is really lousy. I need to hang up and call people again constantly.
It is not really better with FaceTime Audio or any other VOIP tech. It completely sucks! I want to connect instantly and then have a stable connection for at least 30min with crystal clear audio. Am I asking too much for 2022??
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if this is happening to you it’s your fault. You must either live in a coal mine or use terrible tech for your calls. I have voip calls all the time and they’re all what you’re asking for. It just takes a tiny amount of forethought when deciding on what tech to use.
You mean it’s all fine when you sit in your office using fiber and expensive VoIP gear? But how about when you are on the move? The ‘coal mine’ starts 2 meters outside the center of London and that’s not only for data.
Yep, then too. The stats are extremely clear about this, don’t use cheap carriers and don’t use cheap Bluetooth. Southern England has excellent cell coverage.
I spend a lot of time outdoors hiking and biking. Since 2019, I have noticed a serious stagnation -- and possibly degradation -- of phone reception. Used to be, I could send a text and call someone on even 1 bar of EDGE. Now I basically need >2 bars of LTE to do anything -- less than that and my phone isn't usable.
Maybe I need to pick up a 5G device. I am still using an LTE phone from 2016, so there could be some bands I'm missing out on. But my partner's much more recent phone has even more issues.
On my first iPhone, I could get train information on my phone with a 1 bar EDGE connection in a few seconds. Totally impossible in 2022, you indeed need a relatively decent LTE connection. I suspect this has to do with increased congestion on the cell towers.
The stock Android dialer is a complete UX hellscape.
Every other time I need to dial a number, I will be randomly interrupted by some dialogue to enable a feature or to learn about X, when I'm urgently trying to make a call. It's so f-ing rude and intrusive. And it's designed to trick you into enabling shit without giving you time to think it over.
It's such a scummy thing to do, but hey, it's Google. Imagine having to make an emergency phone call, but you can't until you tap through all the prompts. Google basically broke core functionality to do this, and there's no way to disable this nonsense.
Seriously, I just want my phone to be a phone, not some feature riddled shit app that does everything (poorly).
That must be the Google Dialer app. The one in LineageOS which I guess comes from AOSP is perfectly fine and never bothers me about anything. Come to the dark side! ;-)
What phone are you using? That sounds like a terrible experience, I'll need to make sure I avoid it.
For what it's worth, you can install a new dialer from the Play Store. Or you can grab an open source one from F-Droid. The Simple apps are quite popular because they just do one thing and do it well, i.e. https://f-droid.org/packages/com.simplemobiletools.dialer/
Right, but the underlying engine doesn’t matter much practically speaking. I don’t think I’ve ever run into a situation where the browser on iOS limited me from doing things I would want to do on mobile.
I use FireFox on iOS because it syncs with FireFox on my laptop.
I disagree, plenty of posts here that start with "doesn't work on my iPhone".
Apple forces you to adjust to their terrible browser engine by taking away your users' ability to install another browser. Many websites put in the effort to make their stuff work on Apple devices but that's far from a given.
And instead of option to pick dialer, be stuck with the crappy one provided by Apple(lack of spam detection, lack of business directory), with no option to change. Great idea.
That's a great dialer, but unfortunately one cannot choose a default phone number for a contact with it. So for contacts with multiple phone numbers (and that's most of my important contacts, your use case might be different) one must choose with number to dial each time that person is called.
Pixel 7 Pro, but I wouldn't avoid it because their dialer sucks. It's still a really good phone when compared to the iPhone/Samsung Galaxy/etc., and it's the only Android phone series I'd consider in the future.
When I had a Samsung Galaxy, I installed the full suite of Simple apps onto it because the included apps sucked so bad. Simple gets it mostly right from a UI/UX perspective, and I was happy to support the author by purchasing the apps in the Play store.
I have strong suspicion you are not talking about Google's android dialer but some chinese ad-infested knock-off. When I used to have crappy Xiaomi, I had ads everywhere - settings, basic 'android' apps, most probably dialer too, definitely SMS sending app and so on. Threw it away and never looked back.
There are premium androids who give users completely different experience, be it Samsung, Sony, Google etc etc etc. Literally hundreds of models to pick your match. On my S22 ultra I never saw a single similar ad since I bought it. I wish people stopped bashing android just because they cheaped out and then found out that cheap phones are actually cheap to get revenue back in baked-in ads (there are other concerns coming from Google as creator but that's a different topic, since there is no saints among phone manufacturers and lure of ads revenue is too strong even for Apple)
Samsung phones were actually highly ad laden until they realised it was hurting their brand about a year or two before you bought yours. I'm expecting ads to slowly slip back in.
Xiaomi makes fine hardware with overly intrusive firmware installed on it which they sell for competitive prices. The solution is the same as with any other Android device: install one of the many AOSP-derived distributions on it and you have fine hardware with clean firmware offering OTA updates and more freedom than any vendor-supplied distribution offers, not to mention waaaay more freedom than the Apple/iOS combo offers.
Yeah but as father of small children, camera that is always in the pocket is hugely important for me. AFAIK Xiaomi camera app/drivers/whatever is the proper name is a signed blob that has no source available, so something more basic is used instead in those free distros. Thus photo quality suffers since its finely tuned for given sensors/lens/cpu combo. At least that's how I grokked it few years ago.
Since then I've realized phone is by far the most important device in my life, so not cheaping out on it anymore and seeing the difference in every photo.
You're probably talking about some chinese dialer on top of android, Google one is clean and essential.
One thing I always struggle with is that phone becomes painfully slow and heats up like crazy on a call. The one thing it should do without effort seems like the heavier one on the hardware. Wonder how they managed to do phone calls 20-30 years ago if it's such a compute intensive task.
What about iOS where you cant copy in a number and then edit it? Every time I want to call a foreign number and need to add a country code I need to make a new contact and then edit that.
This one drives me crazy in all iOS phone number entry type situations. once you've dialed in the the 10 numbers, it makes it into whatever that little bubble is called that makes it no longer editable. you have to delete the whole bubble of 10 digits, and start typing the whole number again instead of being able to edit the probably single digit that needs correcting.
However, I'm old enough to remember the pain of recognizing a mis-dialed number from rotary phones. Old enough to remember only needing to dial 5 digits. Then the pain of having to dial the full prefix going to 7 digits, growing to full horror going to full 10 digit. luckily by 10 digit, touch tone was in place.
My parents technically don't have a four digit local number any more, but it's the same† national number as it was back then. BT moved two digits from the exchange code to the local part when they digitised the exchange.
†: All UK national numbers gained an extra '1' after the leading '0'; I'm asserting that change doesn't count.
Ohh. And if you think you're so clever and type that prefix before Paste-ing, it doesn't just paste, but replaces all digits you have typed. I also love it when sites omit a country code in their numbers like "(xxx) xxx-xxxx". Well, at least it's not a jpeg.
Are you sure that's Google and not your device manufacturer or your carrier? The dialer on my Android phone seems OK. I'm not going to claim it's the best UX ever, but it certainly doesn't interrupt me with dialogs about anything. Android phones are infamous for having carrier-required crap pre-loaded.
I switched from LG to a pixel. I don't regret the better hardware or more frequent updates, but so many tiny things were substantially better on the LG.
Biggest peeve: on the LG phones I had, you could use the volume buttons / menu to silence or turn down individual applications. On the pixel, out of the box you only get a global media volume control.
Also have experience with the stock phone dialler putting up prompts while I am in the middle of doing something else, which never happened on LG. The other big annoyance is the timer portion of the clock app is significantly harder to use.
All that said, I will happily take stock android on the pixel any day over any Samsung product.
Yea, I feel like there's a big cargo cult element to the claims of carrier skins being crapware by default. I remember the moment I realized that the moto x (first post-Google moto phone) and the contemporary galaxy s both had solid advantages over the pixel. Eg Samsung beat pixel to the quick settings menu by YEARS (and by extension iOS by even more years), and this is now an industry standard.
Notice how in this conversation, no precise program name or version was brought up. "The stock dialer on an LG", "the dialer on a Pixel"...
On a computer (a real computer), the first words would be something like "On Firefox 106.0.2 64-bit", but phones have such abysmal user control that most of the time we don't even know what programs we're running.
To be honest, I'd have to do some digging around to get exact versions of a fair amount of my software on my latop- much of it isn't immediately surfaced in the UI, and where it was installed from could be from several places.
In android, every app version is found in the exact same place on my phone:
Settings > Apps > (select an app) > very bottom has version number. App details takes you to the full details page in the play store, which shows the full name of the app and the publisher name.
To be fair, a good chunk of Android in total is a UX hellscape. This coming from a lifelong Android user. One of Android's greatest strengths (customization) is also it's greatest weakness.
I suppose sometimes there's also a good side to belonging to an older generation (like me): my experience with making phone calls looks like this: walk out into the hallway where the charging station is plugged in, pick up the phone handset, punch in the number, push the green button, wait, and talk. The end.
Haha, yeah, I actually have fond memories of dial wheels. There was something quite meditative about the clicking sound when it ran back into zero position. But then again, most numbers I called back then consisted of just four digits.
Huh, I didn’t know that bone conduction had progressed that far. Do you have a headset with or without the boom mic? Is it always paired to one device, or do you switch between a few? If you do switch it around, does the handoff work well?
Asking because I’ve loved the idea since I first heard about it, and might pick up a headset myself now that I know they’re of decent quality.
There needs to be a Big(O) table for UX. Number of user interactions and decisions to get to each functionality in each screen size. Then comes prioritization. You can only fit so many buttons and boxes close to the hottest zones of user interaction, especially on Mobile, and even less of them in advertising-powered products.
When someone prioritizes the wrong use case on premium real estate and pushes back buttons that matter to you more, that only gets worse over time - your needs are not their priority.
That is why on mobile at least the giants are not always giant enough to squish competition entirely - one can always provide a better UX than Facebook or Google with a small but focused app that works for your problem better. The real damage to competition comes from device apis that put UX overhead to use cases you serve bette than them, but then give their apps with the same use case UX priority in their next release.
Just like data and code, complexity increases for UX with each added user story and use case, but the screen space remains the same.
I work in UX and I can tell you the people managing these design teams have never even heard the term 'Big-O' much less understand it; in my sphere I find they are mostly interested in boosting engagement metrics on whatever new feature will get them sooner promoted before they exit to the next company and do the same thing.
Create maligned reward system, get maligned work. It's not like our field doesn't have resume driven development, and honestly why would you do anything else? Doing good work for your employer only pays if it literally pays. If your employer and the market rewards launching features, products, and making metrics go up then why toil away needlessly making money for someone else?
I haven't done user interface design, in anger, for 20+ years. Before the kids renamed it "UX" (old wine, new bottles).
Anywho. We used to consider Fitts' Law, Hick's Law, and so forth. Celebrity UI designers (ahem) like Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen would belabor these seemingly obvious design considerations ad nauseum.
Your Big-O suggestion could be a nice heuristic for scoring and ranking design alternatives. Cool.
Not that design intent ever mattered. The age old tale remains the same. Grind, iterate, validate. (Does anyone do usability testing any more?) Voilá!
Then some PHB doing drive-by mgmt decrees "Those buttons should be cornflower blue. I like the old font better. Just change it all back."
I eventually rage quit UI work. Preferring to have my good taste, experience, skill, and efforts denigrated in other domains.
It now occurs to me the audience for all that UI design advice was our bosses, not us practitioners. For appeals to authority. For populating our bookshelves, to exude the facsimile of learnedness.
My impression is that it's all quantitative post-fact A/B testing nowadays.
What is interesting, because it was widely known that quantitative usability research was mostly waste and you were much better doing 10 times the amount of it with only qualitative results.
What was not widely discussed¹ is that post-fact testing is also almost useless. It can only tell you what solution is better, but the real gain comes from discovering what problems exist.
> Often it’s the wireless earbuds, which won’t reconnect or are connected to the wrong device.
Wireless headsets seem to have intentionally crippled functionality in many areas for no particular reason[1]. The point of being wireless is that you aren't connected to a device. Why do they need a logical connection? If you're listening to two devices, just accept the packets from both devices, and play them over the audio output.
[1] See also: if you turn on the microphone, you can no longer have audio output in stereo. It switches to mono, because... because.
> There would be a simple solution: add a good ole' vu-meter.
They're already there! Google Meet, for example, has them, and they also show whether the mic is muted in Meet itself or not. I can often tell that they're muted in the meeting because not only is it that their mouth is moving and no sound is coming out, but also because the little "muted" icon is perched on their tile. The same exact way they could, if they looked at the indicator.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadOk, I get it. There's a few technically-challenged people that struggle with emails and texts and prefer to use their voice. I'm perfectly happy to deal with that.
But they call and leave a voice mail that focuses on the wrong information. They'll agonizingly slowly spell out their first and last name (D-as-in-dog, E-as-in-elephant, etc) and phone number (even though any digital system provides that already) but not even mention what they're calling for.
What should be a 15 second voice mail like "Hey Mark, this is Denise from the Jersey office. Please send Rachel in sales the paperwork for order #9485. Let me know if there's any problems with that. Thanks!" turns into a 2 minute long voicemail that is physically painful to listen to and that ignores the only necessary piece of information required and turns into an unnecessary game of phone tag.
I would argue that you’re a zoomer curmudgeon rather than an old one. :)
Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People” has an anecdote about him writing that as kid to some person he wanted to impress, and it predictably having the opposite effect.
Not like it's any less painful on a live call. I wish I had a setting to automatically tase anyone who calls me and when I answer the first thing they want to know is what I'm doing. As if it's up to them to judge whether what I'm doing is more important than whatever bullshit they've called me up for. You tell me what you need and then I will tell you if and when I can do it. Sooner or later I'm going to start answering these people honestly. "Oh, nothing much Sharon, just browsing some naked anime women."
Speaking of which, when I call any customer service, they ALWAYS ask for my phone number. I've been baffled by this for awhile. Why? Can't they see it?
I almost wish there was some low-tech thing for sending text in-band in voice calls, like DTMF but for all ASCII characters, or some 75 baud protocol / tones so you could be like 'Ok, I am sending my name / email / account #. <sending> See it on your screen? great! screencap it... copy and paste it into your app now, etc!'
I expect there are even younger people than I who used rotary phones as kids.
I just bought my first smart phone and spent a while in developer mode quieting it down to extend battery life so some old people can do this.
[1] - https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html
Some can, many won't. Eye sight and dexterity problems have a lot to do with this. When you can't see and your hands shake it's a lot easier to just "hey google call so-and-so."
Also even those of us who don’t ca that much, do receive calls since some entities still prefer to call you (government, medical, education). It’s either that or snail mail - despite the fact that most of them have my email address.
FTFY
Just yesterday I received spam call, my only response was answering with "Yes?", then when they started to talk about something I just hang up without a word, they wasted enough of my time and energy. Private matter I communicate 100% through IM or video calls within IM, it must be very rare ocassion that my retired father calls me on the phone or that I have to call wife because she is not responding to IM.
compared to the myriad of ads plastered everywhere. I suppose the latter has just been normalized - yet the amount of 'energy' (as in joules; or as in human frustration) is unparalleled compared to the one spent on unwanted calls, or just calls.
Absolutely no spam on my "in country" sim there. Just exactly what I asked for, useful calls and texts.
The moment I got back, I was inundated with spam and texts.
I don't understand how we've let it get this bad in the USA.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045618/spam-calls-per-m...
Same phone number for 17 years, dozens and dozens of companies have seen it.
Recently I reacted with incredulity when the people on the other end could properly hear me through a newly-connected Bluetooth device -- it's more jarring to me when this stuff doesn't fail.
Better choose decent phone next time, mind sharing what phone causes you this trouble?
There's no way Samsung made a phone with no proximity sensor
.. well, then again, they did make the Note 7.. https://youtu.be/0IVk8PsSgEI
https://nasilemaktech.com/samsung-galaxy-s10-series-proximit...
are you using samsung phone app or 3rd party app? see my other comment with links how to resolve it
What I mean to say is - there's a very high chance that your device is broken.
I found guy reporting it as software issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/galaxys10/comments/bzv9oq/proximity...
though other says it's faulty design https://www.reddit.com/r/galaxys10/comments/d94ob7/proximity...
Samsung recommended to return the phone, some people had luck with changing Touch sensitivity settings and Accidental touch protection https://piunikaweb.com/2019/03/18/samsung-galaxy-s10-proximi...
possible to test it here to see whether it's hardware or software issue https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/the-proximity-sensor-is-n...
But considering not all people have this problem it's either software error, software setting or some batches had hardware issue or they fixed the design.
There are many other aspect of "calling" that has gotten worst, including call quality, codec and signal etc. My thinking is that no one calls anymore and no one gives a damn about phone calling.
I still remember I used to buy Motorola Phone just because of their Crystal talk.
On one side, a natural decline in people using the phone (replaced by texting/apps)
On the other side: the cell companies no longer “encumbered” by laws around landline reliability, cramming ever more phone calls in to the same amount of bandwidth
The cell companies could have the clearest call quality by a wide margin, if they chose to. TBH, (and I know I’m an outlier) even though I talk to people for maybe 5 hours a month, I would still switch providers to one that offered call a quality equivalent to being in person
This being so bad is a phone design issue that goes beyond the touchscreen.
Well designed phones have two microphones and speakers, so when in speakerphone the top becomes the mic and the bottom the speaker, preventing deafening people in the event of an accidental switch.
Summary: Specific Absorption Rate - how much RF energy your head is absorbing.
More often the fact that no matter how much a reviewer praised your earbuds' call quality, it's total shite and the person on the other end of the line will ask if you're in a car or using speakerphone.
This has never happened to me - using either wired headphones or AirPods which connect rather seamlessly to the phone even mid-call. Just get headphones that work well with your phone’s model.
The whole article sounds very “millennials discover telephony” to me - either that or the author is in way over their head and don’t really know how to use the smorgasbord of devices they appear to have maneuvered themselves into.
Add in a few more switches such as in the car or a Bluetooth speaker and the article rings true for me.
The left one just works.
I won't buy them again.
If anything, in my experience, it is service providers' cell coverage and cell reception on phones barely designed to be phones that are all so abysmal that it doesn't even matter if everything else works well. They alone make cellphones terrible as phones when on cellular.
And in general, BlueTooth sucks. I need to do an incantation to keep my PS4 controllers connected, a problem reported by many in various forums.
It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email.
It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail.
The subject line takes only 15 seconds to write but will significantly reduce receiver anxiety, both synchronously and asynchronously. Sending a text after the call is not the same because it’s not in context.
I remember proposing this to WhatsApp while I was working at FB but the WhatsApp culture seemed uninterested in feature ideas of any kind. Hopefully someone else does it eventually.
Well, what is stopping your wife from also texting you, if it was something important and she did not reach you? And what would force her, to use a potential subject line?
Otherwise it is an interesting idea, but I doubt it will be a killer feature, as most would simply ignore it.
[0]: https://support.google.com/android/answer/9069335?hl=en#zipp...
LOL. She does. "Call me"
Very helpful.
I personally hate unscheduled calls, and I'd love it if everyone sent a text first to check if you're free for a call, and only call after you've accepted, but... that's just never gonna happen.
It’s like sending a calendar invite. Sure, you can send an invite with nothing but your email address and a date+time. But many people would find an empty invite a bit rude. It’s just polite to include some context about the meeting. The phone call should evolve in that direction.
No reason to make people work any harder than they do now.
Yeah, I think it's called IM.
> It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context.
That's called DND, my phone is 100% time in DND mode. There are already filters for spam calls based on phone number.
> It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!”
Maybe tell wife to write you IM/SMS or just communicate through IM as priority, if you desire text communication?
Not the parent, but Dog knows I have been trying. Some people just don’t understand how disruptive an unnecessary phone call is.
It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function. If you don't want that, wouldn't a pad be a better option than a phone?
Besides, how would you handle calls from landlines and such?
Direct to voicemail, of course, with a message saying 'text me' for automatic transcription. As they say, its a feature not a bug [to not be interrupted]. In a perfect world I'd have a secretary or AI to screen calls on my behalf, but I don't.
Now that I think of it, I might actually try this the next time a telemarketer calls.
----
[0] - I haven't actually tested it, nor seen it in action - just saw it being mentioned when I reviewed "Tips" app after update.
https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/9118387?hl=en
Android tablets? Several.
There are some, but none of them would be suitable for consumer use.
I stand corrected!
Yes, it's primarily a phone by market segmentation. But it's a small tablet by features.
1) Do they make devices that aren't phones that are the size of a note"pad"? The smallest non-phone tablet devices are now (with the death of iPod touch) the size of (at best) a small note"book", not a sensibly-sized-for-portable-usage note"pad".
2) That doesn't even solve the problem as tons of Internet-connected messaging software now supports calls, so I feel like you are missing the point in some sense: the person you are responding to is seriously talking about WhatsApp!
To me, it's a good quality camera that I can fit in my pocket.
No, it's not. You sound like a dinosaur. A phone's primary functions are 1) text-messaging apps, 2) camera, 3) dating apps, 4) banking apps, and various others. Phone calls are somewhere around #20.
Phone calls haven't forced full screen takeovers for several years on iOS, and have the same UX as 3rd party VoIP and Video call apps...
I haven't taken a phone call in over a month now (from the Amazon delivery guy). I use dating and texting apps every day. For actual talking to friends/family, I use voice and video chat functions in chat apps.
Phone = Telephone: The term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, "far" and φωνή, phōnē, "voice", together meaning "distant voice".
Distant voice communication is the entire purpose for a phone.
Just because you want or expect your phone to do more, doesn’t make your desires the primary function of the device.
Names change much slower the function generally.
1. Allows an instant, full-screen foreground takeover over whatever else you are currently doing on the device
2. Rings and vibrates your device
3. Has a button that could allow an unknown person to send and receive audio to and from your device
4. All of this is triggered remotely, from anyone in the world, without any kind of user identification or authentication, besides a spoofable number
No app store's rules in either major ecosystem would allow such an abusive app. Yet, only because the legacy concept of a "phone call" exists, not only is the app allowed, but it's preloaded on every device out there!
Currently on iOS, #1 is not done by any app including the phone, and #2-#4 are in fact allowed by App Store apps.
The phone feature is a legacy feature that goes away with 2G. Soon carriers will only be moving data.
The providers have data to show that the phone functionality is not a primary use case. It is a legacy product whose overhead has a real cost on our economy.
When do we stop paying $10-$20 a month per lines of service, for the privileging of being interrupted? When do we stop calling it a smartphone and treating as such and recognizing it as as computer, a laptop for your pocket.
I expect those born in the last century to be most resistant to the deprecation of the 'phone call' as a concept. People also reminisced about having phone lines that were partied together. Imagine what scammers would do with that today.
Whatever telcos are doing these days would have led to jail time in the 1990s.
I would like to see a return to the government passing QOS laws for safety critical services, then enforcing them.
Since everyone is dunking on twitter these days: How is it legal for them to slap an auth wall on top of emergency response agencies' feeds? If I MITM'ed the emergency broadcast system with such bullshit, I'd go to jail. Twitter is used during emergencies by at least 100x more people than emergency broadcast.
If they made pads the size of my phone that could still use cell network internet and that I could put a custom OS on I'd consider it.
So? This is a way to improve phone calls.
Not for about fifteen years or so, no. I don't even have the Phone app on the front page of my iPhone, let alone allow it to sit in the dock. Regardless, whatever the primary function of the device, there is room for improvement over "it's always worked that way".
Problem solved.
- arrange a call, which is great because then I am guaranteed to have the time to deal with the topic, I do that sometimes with my bank;
- leave a voice mail, which is not great but then I am not responsible for their phone number policy (nobody leaves voice mail anymore);
- send an email (or a SMS, a WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Skype, whatever, I am not picky), possibly to arrange a phone call, also great because I can answer written messages on my own terms and not when they feel like calling me;
- (most of the time these days) have a chat over whatever IM platform they integrated into their website.
My time is not theirs to use however they want. If they want me to be on call, that’s fine, but with compensation.
I once called my brother from a phone that was not mine, in the middle of the night, to inform him that our brother had died suddenly. He did not answer. He got that message in the morning when he checked his voicemail after waking up. He was very upset at the delay.
Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.
Well, sometimes shit happen. I can think of a handful of scenarios where I cannot be contacted and it’s right that sometimes it could be important. But I am not living on alert 24/7 because sometimes someone might die. My filtering system lets the second call through, which I think works fine as most spammers do not call twice within one minute. That said, in the middle of the night I still probably would not hear, but not because of that.
(I am sure that the situation was complex and difficult to manage enough for you to have to borrow a phone, and I do not envy you for having gone through it and am sorry you had to. In that situation I would be very upset regardless of the delay).
> Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.
That’s entirely right and I agree completely. But then we are where we are and the world often disagrees with me. Otherwise I could also get rid of my ads and trackers blockers.
For that matter, if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. It’s just e-mail.
Différent generations have different norms and it’s not right or wrong.
My point was to emphasize how across generations, everyone seems to think that the youth have bad norms and it’s somehow wrong, and then they grow up and the world keeps spinning, and the cycle repeats.
It’s awfully vain to think that the norms of your generation in your nation at your point in time are magically the ”better” ones.
The parent comment reference a novel idea that phone calls could have a subject line. It’s novel, it’s clever, it would solve many problems beyond just “people are scared to be human”. The world moves on, and we can improve it or we can launch ad hominem attacks on the next generation.
Yes.
> and it’s not right or wrong.
No.
This sort of relativism of all norms, mores, morals, and ethics needs to stop. There are some cultural and social norms/mores that are better than others. We know this, because empirically some produce better outcomes than others. Mass-scale social anxiety at having to interact with another human being is NOT healthy for society, and is likely the underlying cause for a significant amount of the current social ills that are either new or increasing over time.
Every generation thought that society was collapsing. Despite that, time progresses, people age out of the population and a new generation is born. And society (mostly) doesn’t collapse.
Now I email hundreds of times a day, and have constantly shifted deadlines to no professional detriment. I still get nervous emailing a new important person, but you do it anyways.
Do people really forget what it’s like being young? Sometimes you just grow up and move on.
I mean... aren't you ignoring them? It's an email. Where'd the first one go that the second one is going to be any different?
Humans I know contact me through whatsapp. Or if they're old (and hell, I'm almost 40, so I mean old) through text or phone. Strangers' only real hope is text. I'll probably miss anything else. And even that is getting so goddamn spammy now that it's not far from being like email: only useful if I'm already expecting a message. I receive stupid political ads for states I've never lived in a couple times a day.
If you email me again, it might get read at a more convenient time, and I'll answer.
Same reason I might not answer your call: I'm busy with something else or not near my phone at the moment. This used to be normal by the way -- if I called your home phone and nobody answered, I'd have no choice but to call again later.
Is this 2018? C'mon - phone calls don't actually do full screen takeovers on your device anymore, do they?
Pixel phones have call screening feature. It can be enabled for all calls or unknown callers. It asks the caller to state the reason they are calling and notifies you with the text of the reason given and you can choose whether to accept or reject.
If you want something more then you could just ask callers to text you instead.
The flow I get people into is to communicate via text (slack, whatsapp, etc depending on the nature of the environment) with a "hey, is now a good time to call", or "I wanted to discuss XYZ", and we can then hash out the best method for communication.
The authors complaint is valid, but I think it is more of a UX issue, similar to what you're suggesting here.
Great handle BTW
Agree that wifi isn't reliable, but not for that reason: microwave ovens haven't been an issue for wifi since most people switched to the 5GHz band, many years ago.
I have recent stories from friends whose apartment microwave will cause internet issues.
Apple gets props for making it break less often than everyone else but it's a fundamentally broken UI and broken protocol.
I have a voice that does not match most people's associations with my name, so the first minute of every phone call is spent explaining myself (sometimes it feels more like justifying). I've been mistaken for phishing attacks and got hung up on a few times too.
>Hello? … Wait, hello? Can you hear me? Okay, hold on. Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it. Okay, never mind, I’ll just hold it up to my head. Hi, ugh, sorry about that.
I can confirm this. However, there is another class of problems, too, which aren't mentioned. Network problems. It is the year 2022 and still in many areas reception is really lousy. I need to hang up and call people again constantly.
It is not really better with FaceTime Audio or any other VOIP tech. It completely sucks! I want to connect instantly and then have a stable connection for at least 30min with crystal clear audio. Am I asking too much for 2022??
Yep, then too. The stats are extremely clear about this, don’t use cheap carriers and don’t use cheap Bluetooth. Southern England has excellent cell coverage.
Maybe I need to pick up a 5G device. I am still using an LTE phone from 2016, so there could be some bands I'm missing out on. But my partner's much more recent phone has even more issues.
Every other time I need to dial a number, I will be randomly interrupted by some dialogue to enable a feature or to learn about X, when I'm urgently trying to make a call. It's so f-ing rude and intrusive. And it's designed to trick you into enabling shit without giving you time to think it over.
It's such a scummy thing to do, but hey, it's Google. Imagine having to make an emergency phone call, but you can't until you tap through all the prompts. Google basically broke core functionality to do this, and there's no way to disable this nonsense.
Seriously, I just want my phone to be a phone, not some feature riddled shit app that does everything (poorly).
Anyway, OP can always pick the one that works for him. There's lots of options.
For what it's worth, you can install a new dialer from the Play Store. Or you can grab an open source one from F-Droid. The Simple apps are quite popular because they just do one thing and do it well, i.e. https://f-droid.org/packages/com.simplemobiletools.dialer/
This is the problem with Stockholm Syndrome. You think you're on the right side the entire time.
I use FireFox on iOS because it syncs with FireFox on my laptop.
Apple forces you to adjust to their terrible browser engine by taking away your users' ability to install another browser. Many websites put in the effort to make their stuff work on Apple devices but that's far from a given.
When I had a Samsung Galaxy, I installed the full suite of Simple apps onto it because the included apps sucked so bad. Simple gets it mostly right from a UI/UX perspective, and I was happy to support the author by purchasing the apps in the Play store.
There are premium androids who give users completely different experience, be it Samsung, Sony, Google etc etc etc. Literally hundreds of models to pick your match. On my S22 ultra I never saw a single similar ad since I bought it. I wish people stopped bashing android just because they cheaped out and then found out that cheap phones are actually cheap to get revenue back in baked-in ads (there are other concerns coming from Google as creator but that's a different topic, since there is no saints among phone manufacturers and lure of ads revenue is too strong even for Apple)
Since then I've realized phone is by far the most important device in my life, so not cheaping out on it anymore and seeing the difference in every photo.
One thing I always struggle with is that phone becomes painfully slow and heats up like crazy on a call. The one thing it should do without effort seems like the heavier one on the hardware. Wonder how they managed to do phone calls 20-30 years ago if it's such a compute intensive task.
However, I'm old enough to remember the pain of recognizing a mis-dialed number from rotary phones. Old enough to remember only needing to dial 5 digits. Then the pain of having to dial the full prefix going to 7 digits, growing to full horror going to full 10 digit. luckily by 10 digit, touch tone was in place.
†: All UK national numbers gained an extra '1' after the leading '0'; I'm asserting that change doesn't count.
Biggest peeve: on the LG phones I had, you could use the volume buttons / menu to silence or turn down individual applications. On the pixel, out of the box you only get a global media volume control.
Also have experience with the stock phone dialler putting up prompts while I am in the middle of doing something else, which never happened on LG. The other big annoyance is the timer portion of the clock app is significantly harder to use.
All that said, I will happily take stock android on the pixel any day over any Samsung product.
On a computer (a real computer), the first words would be something like "On Firefox 106.0.2 64-bit", but phones have such abysmal user control that most of the time we don't even know what programs we're running.
In android, every app version is found in the exact same place on my phone:
Settings > Apps > (select an app) > very bottom has version number. App details takes you to the full details page in the play store, which shows the full name of the app and the publisher name.
Right now, this is my only major gripe on an otherwise great phone.
Did I mention that I don't own a smart phone?
Everyone else - particularly cold-call sales droids - can do one.
these days I wear an AfterShokz "bone conducting" headset pretty much as soon as I get up in the morning till i go to bed.
I listen to podcasts/audiobooks/music and make calls on it all day... no issues.
Asking because I’ve loved the idea since I first heard about it, and might pick up a headset myself now that I know they’re of decent quality.
The model i have is paired with one phone. not sure if the newer models have multi pairing.
Music is kinda crap on them. but everything else is fine.
I also have a set of Bose QC45's for Teams and decent music listening. that also supports multi pairing
Audio quality on most calls is also atrocious. I have to keep the phone glued to my ear and walk out to a quiet room to even hear anything.
Email and phone, I hate to say it, are dying. And spam is the culprit in both cases.
When someone prioritizes the wrong use case on premium real estate and pushes back buttons that matter to you more, that only gets worse over time - your needs are not their priority.
That is why on mobile at least the giants are not always giant enough to squish competition entirely - one can always provide a better UX than Facebook or Google with a small but focused app that works for your problem better. The real damage to competition comes from device apis that put UX overhead to use cases you serve bette than them, but then give their apps with the same use case UX priority in their next release.
Just like data and code, complexity increases for UX with each added user story and use case, but the screen space remains the same.
I love this idea, but my outlook is grim.
Anywho. We used to consider Fitts' Law, Hick's Law, and so forth. Celebrity UI designers (ahem) like Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen would belabor these seemingly obvious design considerations ad nauseum.
Your Big-O suggestion could be a nice heuristic for scoring and ranking design alternatives. Cool.
Not that design intent ever mattered. The age old tale remains the same. Grind, iterate, validate. (Does anyone do usability testing any more?) Voilá!
Then some PHB doing drive-by mgmt decrees "Those buttons should be cornflower blue. I like the old font better. Just change it all back."
I eventually rage quit UI work. Preferring to have my good taste, experience, skill, and efforts denigrated in other domains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law
It now occurs to me the audience for all that UI design advice was our bosses, not us practitioners. For appeals to authority. For populating our bookshelves, to exude the facsimile of learnedness.
My impression is that it's all quantitative post-fact A/B testing nowadays.
What is interesting, because it was widely known that quantitative usability research was mostly waste and you were much better doing 10 times the amount of it with only qualitative results.
What was not widely discussed¹ is that post-fact testing is also almost useless. It can only tell you what solution is better, but the real gain comes from discovering what problems exist.
1 - My guess it's because it is too obvious.
Wireless headsets seem to have intentionally crippled functionality in many areas for no particular reason[1]. The point of being wireless is that you aren't connected to a device. Why do they need a logical connection? If you're listening to two devices, just accept the packets from both devices, and play them over the audio output.
[1] See also: if you turn on the microphone, you can no longer have audio output in stereo. It switches to mono, because... because.
One of the things I hate most is that I often can't hear people.
Selling people jobs on the phone is stressful enough, but extremely annoying if I don't get feedback whether the person even heard what I said.
It seems unnecessary to have infrastructure for two different technologies that do the same thing.
> It had its quirks—You’re muted, Cathy, and so forth—
There would be a simple solution: add a good ole' vu-meter.
This would also help with incorrect gain, which is why they had been present on recording equipment for almost a century.
They're already there! Google Meet, for example, has them, and they also show whether the mic is muted in Meet itself or not. I can often tell that they're muted in the meeting because not only is it that their mouth is moving and no sound is coming out, but also because the little "muted" icon is perched on their tile. The same exact way they could, if they looked at the indicator.
Cell phones have become jacks of all trades and in the process have become difficult to use as phones.