GSM Cell Phone Reception Quality? 68
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?"
Testing cell stuff is hard (Score:2, Interesting)
near a tower the voice quality is excellent.
Trying to determine the best phone is just about impossible
however, because of the variations in the phones themselves.
Sad to say, but after the "bag phones" each generation after
got a little worse in terms of build quality. I have a V66
from Motorola, which I've dived into a couple of times now,
to tweak things and make it more reliable. My wife's V66
was never as sensitive as mine, such that in null spots I
could often get a signal and make a call when hers could
not. Looking around for others with T-Mobile at school she
found the T610 which performed better than her phone, so I
scrounged one up on Ebay. I must say, this phone does a
great job of picking up *everything* in a room. You could
consider it a bugging device almost.
sensitive as the one that convinced her to get one, which
was another data point that todays phones are really rather
random in terms of their quality.
I think the best bet is to buy a phone at some place where
you can take it back if you don't like it.