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[Tom Worthington]

On 26/09/11 08:36, Paul Bolger wrote:
> Mines an Ideos (u8150). I'm inclined to agree that the sound quality
> is not as good as the older phones ...

The Huawei "Deuce" U8520-1 smart phone does not appear to have a good 
antenna and the Vodafone 3G signal level in my apartment building in 
Canberra is very low. As a result I had calls dropping out in the 
stairwell. So I set the phone to use GSM (2G) instead. This improved the 
signal level and also improved the quality of the audio.

The improved audio is unlikely to be due to the signal level. It may be 
due to the GSM service using a different CODEC with a narrower range of 
audio frequencies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM#Voice_codecs

Normally that would make for worse sounding calls. But the U8520's audio 
has a booming quality at the high low end and this may be being now cut out.

3D PRINTED FLIP COVERS FOR SMART PHONES

A simple and inexpensive way to improve the sound quality from the 
smaller "slate" phones would be to use a custom cover to turn them into 
a flip phone. The result would look like the Motorola A760 touch screen 
flip phone from 2003.

Covers could be made on demand with a 3D printer. Some phone cases made 
this way are already available, from the Shapeways and "Freedom of 
Creation" 3D print bureaus. But no flip ones I could find so far: 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/09/large-screen-smart-flip-phone.html


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards 
Legislation

Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/