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GSM Cell Phone Reception Quality?
A not-so-anonymous reader asks: "I am about to buy a new cell phone and my primary focus is on good reception quality, as I have bad network coverage at home. I made some tests using some phones I have access to and got a subjective rating of T610 < K500i < 6520 < V600i, where T610 means 'nearly no service' and V600i gives 'service even in the wine cellar'. Googling around did not give any useful hints. Has anyone compared the reception quality of current GSM phones via simple locations testing, or better yet with commercial GSM testing equipment?"
Go to Howard Forums and search/re-post your question. I'm pretty sure it's been discussed a quadrillion times.
I've had nothing but clear calls and good reception from my 2-months-old Sony Ericsson z520a. Pretty cheap, too, plus it's a quad-band world phone. By far the best phone I've ever had in terms of reception, voice quality, battery life, and general, all-around easy-to-use-ness in a small, palm-friendly clamshell.
B
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
I'm more familiar with CDMA, but both the noise floor and the signal strength determined reception quality. The noise floor is more of a factor w/ CDMA than GSM.
And different phones use different algorithms for computing "the number of bars", so definitely don't use that to compare phones.
I assume that you're in the United States.
A few simple rules of thumb should see you clear:
1) You should try to get a phone which supports the 850 band, as this gives far better in-building coverage than 1900.
2) The network you choose probably makes more difference than the phone you choose. Choose the network with the best coverage in your area, if you're in a poor service location.
3) There's not that much difference between the sensitivity of different GSM phones - they all have to meet the same RF specifications, and few beat them by very much. However, an external (stubby) antenna, while possibly causing an unsightly bulge in your trousers, will probably give silghtly better reception in practice than one with an internal patch antenna, if only because you won't get the attenuation from your hand while you're holding it.
4) Please, please don't use the signal strength meter as a guide. A true story: some years back I was working for a manufacturer whose new phone was slated by a magazine for "poor sensitivity". We tested the review phone when it came back and it was working very well. We loaded some new software which showed full signal strength for a relatively poor signal (about -97dBm, IIRC), and sent it (exactly the same phone) back. In the next issue the magazine printed a note to say that they had since tested a new sample of our phone which was much more sensitive...
5) If you're really still looking at marginal differences, Motorola phones often have slightly better sensitivity than average in the 1900MHz band. Alternatively (may not be what you're looking for as UMTS, not GSM), phones with the Qualcomm chipsets can be tuned to turn in very good performance. I have an LG U880 which pulls a signal when most others fail. I must admit an interest here, as a Qualcomm employee, but our GSM/GPRS implementation really is among the best around.
A quick hover over the submitter's link would have shown he's in Europe. Like most of the rest of the world, Europe uses GSM. Reception for GSM there (here) is far better than the US - because it's the only system in most countries, there are more densely spaced nodes.
An in fact GSM is usually superior for the public - I can travel to any european country, or australia, or new zealand, or africa or the middle east or america and when i land, I turn on my phone and it just works. If I buy a new phone, I dont have to go to my provider and pick from their choice, I can buy one from anyone (in any of the above countries), stick in my SIM card and it works right away (subject to the 3 possible bands, most phones are at least tri-band).
OK, so GSM is a bit more picky in rural areas where you might be many km from a base station, but the freedom you get from GSM tends to outweigh a little spectrum inefficiency. 1.6 billion people use GSM.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
I on the other hand have the leaden ear of an engineer and the engineering skills of an orchestra conductor. But, I use cell phones a lot. I use my phone around 3500 prime time minutes a month, and I don't have any idea how many non-prime I use. I charge my phone nightly, and it usually needs it. I send over 1000 text messages a month. And, all I care about is how well they work. I don't care about the camera, I don't care about the video games, and I don't care about the lifestyle accessories.
All cellular systems suffer from the flaw that structure, geography and EM interference separate you from their network. That aside, you then look at the robustness of the protocols, the length of talk time, how well they work in noisy environments, what they make your voice sound like on the other end, whether or not you can hear the ring tone, how easy is it to place a call, how easy is it to add a number to the address book.
The really important thing to ask is how well does a given phone and network perform in the places where I need to use it? For me, it's the office, my house, my car and in large international cities. I need a reasonably up to date phone that supports all the network features.
Given these criteria, a GSM world phone is the only phone for me.
The most trying environments for my phone seems to be switching cells in rush hour traffic, my brother's house and a 150 yard stretch between my San Francisco apartment and I-80.
That said, I have settled on T-Mobile, because with them I get the talk time and text message count I need, and their international support is very good (after all my first T-mobile account was in the UK).
Now, onto the question asked. Assuming GSM and T-mobile, my history has led me to the Nokia 6230i.
I have used Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony within these parameters and my conclusions are as follow:
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