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Why Mobile Phones Are Annoying
griffinn writes "Jakob Neilsen recently conducted a study comparing the perceived annoyance level of two commuters having a face-to-face conversation and one commuter talking on the mobile phone. Interestingly enough, subjects were also asked whether the ring tone is annoying, and people didn't find the ring to be particularly bad."
The study was done by Monk et al. Nielsen's story is merely an abstract.
Original article: Andrew Monk, Jenni Carroll, Sarah Parker, and Mark Blythe: "Why are Mobile Phones Annoying?" Behaviour and Information Technology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2004, pp. 33-41.
I don't think I have ever finsihed a conversation with that dude
That might be because you never start any novel conversation.
MODERATORS: read this guy's posting history and perhaps you'll realize he's recycling posts and karma-whoring like there's no tomorrow.
It's the same here in Seoul. On the subway everyone is talking on their mobile phones, but you can barely hear them speak. Many girls cover their mouth (and the phone) with their free hand while they talk. Most people have their phone on vibrate/silent "manner mode".
What really annoys me is the people who play their games on their phones with the volume turned up, although you can do this with a gameboy too.
Or you could get an N-gage :)
They did an allegedly controlled study on a train, where phone calls are at least somewhat expected and tolerated. The parent is discussing his experience in a theater, which is a very different situation. If he works in the theater, then his sample size is likely large enough to make reasonably accurate experiential generalizations.
-Graham
...or as he is even better known:
Dom Joly
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Uh, Its not TDMA, T-Mobile uses GSM. It 'uses' TDMA, but its not the same thing.
The problem is phones without active noise reduction. My T39m works fine with normal-voice-level on a bus. I only have issues in very windy conditions.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Also, from the linked page (perhaps read your sources first?):
"All of the PCS technologies try to minimize battery consumption during calls by keeping the transmission of unnecessary data to a minimum. The phone decides whether or not you are presently speaking, or if the sound it hears is just background noise. If the phone determines that there is no intelligent data to transmit, it blanks the audio and it reduces the transmitter duty cycle (in the case of TDMA) or the number of transmitted bits (in the case of CDMA). When the audio is blanked, your caller would suddenly find themselves listening to "dead air", and this may cause them to think the call has dropped."
Which comes back around to, if phones had decent microphones -- you wouldn't be expecting the rush of awful background noise all the time.
And no, they don't introduce clicks and pops -- my phone routinely goes silent -- I would blame that on crappy phones.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Good point. This is actually designed into conventional phones, and it has a name: "sidetone".
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GSM was built in the 80's, CDMA in the 90's, CDMA2000 in the 00's. TDMA isn't in the ballpark of quality to either GSM or CDMA. But GSM isn't nearly as good as CDMA. CDMA has much better voice quality, reliability, coverage, band width, and maintainability with a lower number of support staff (ie cheaper).
GSM is to CDMA as VCR is to DVD player.
TDMA is to GSM as Wire/String is to Telegraph.
TDMA is to CDMA as Wire/String is VR teleprompt.
With someone with experince in CDMA, TDMA and GSM.
I believe that passive shielding deliberately designed to block cells may not be legal, but both it and (definitely not legal) active jamming of cells does take place at a small number of locations (fancy restauraunts, theaters).
I'd carry a personal jammer, if they were legal, and flip it on when I was at a theater.
May we never see th