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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.
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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