If you're looking for the best of the best when it comes to call quality, call management and talk time, we take an in-depth look at the five best smartphones for calling here.
Hands-down, the HTC Tilt 2 (and its siblings on other carriers) has the best call management we've seen on any cell phone, and we think HTC's ideas will set the pace for business smartphones to come. When you make a call with Tilt 2, the phone aggregates useful information about your caller into a tabbed menu at the bottom of the screen. You can access address book info, calendar events that include your caller, and even recent messages from that contact. Everything about the calling features on the Tilt 2 was easy and intuitive, from dialing to managing conference calls to engaging the top-notch spearkerphone. The phone has a high-quality duplex speakerphone with 2 microphones, and to activate a speaker call you simply place the phone face down during a call. Pick it up again and the speaker deactivates. It's genius, and it sounds great.
Call quality on the phone was also very good. Our callers sounded clean and clear, and our callers had no trouble understanding us. Reception could have been better. We were usually stuck in the middle of the phone's signal range, around 3 bars or so. Sometimes, our calls didn't go through, even when signal looked strong, but this only happened a few times in our test period. Battery life was good, on par with what HTC promises. Cutting down on background activity, we managed to get more than 6 hours of talk time from the HTC Tilt 2. But with every feature up and running, the phone didn't last a full day without needing to be charged.
The HTC Tilt 2 gets some basic Facebook support in the address book. It doesn't go nearly as far as the full synchronization in the Palm Pre, but you can pull pictures and birthdates from your Facebook account and link them to your contact list. We'd like to see e-mail addresses and more personal info added to that feature.
Call quality on the BlackBerry Bold 9700 was pretty good. We got to test a T-Mobile version of the device, which uses not only T-Mobile's 3G HSDPA network but also UMA calling. So, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 can place calls over Wi-Fi or the regular cell network. That's especially convenient if cell service is questionable in your home, or if the cellular network should happen to go down, as T-Mobile's network did earlier this month. When the cellular and data network went down, T-Mobile's UMA phones were still able to complete their calls.
Battery life on the BlackBerry Bold 9700 was fantastic, as we'd expect from RIM's BlackBerry phones. It wasn't quite as good as Sprint's Tour, but we also kept Wi-Fi turned on for UMA calling, while Sprint's phone doesn't have Wi-Fi capabilities. Even with Wi-Fi turned on, we got almost 6.5 hours of talking time in a single call, which is even better than RIM's estimates. Signal strength on the T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold 9700 was okay, usually hovering around 3-4 bars of service.
To synchronize your address book, the BlackBerry Bold can draw from your BlackBerry Enterprise Server, or if you don't have an Enterprise Server account, the phone can also sync your address book with Google or even Facebook, among other popular online e-mail services. We especially like Facebook sync, which pulls contact info from Facebook and matches your existing contacts to your Facebook friends.
For calling features, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 packs all of our favorites. There's speaker-independent voice dialing, which gets its own dedicated button on the side of the phone. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 does a fine job with conference calling, though like most features on the BlackBerry, you'll have to do some menu digging to accomplish the feat. Finally, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 gets visual voicemail support on both AT&T and T-Mobile. We love visual voicemail, and we can't see a future when all smartphones don't let you pick and choose which messages you hear easily from a dedicated app.
Since the HTC Touch Pro2, the company has continued to impress with their calling features. The HTC Imagio gets most of the best features from the TouchPro2, except for the duplex speakerphone. Still, the phone sounded very good in our tests, clean and clear, and reception was always solid. Battery life was pretty good, but it could have been better. We could usually get a full day's use out of a single charge if we didn't spend too much time watching TV or taking pictures with the screen as a viewfinder. But we always had to charge the phone overnight or risk a dead battery before lunch the next day.
For calling features, as we mentioned, the Imagio gets an impressive lot. HTC integrates the contact list into the calling screen, so during a call you can see your caller's contact info, their recent messages to you, calendar information and more. It's a great, well-organized and helpful system that will become a standard in smartphones. But beyond HTC's innovations, the Imagio also gets great features from Verizon Wireless, including Visual Voicemail. There's also speaker-independent voice dialing, and the voice dialer usually recognized our commands, once we figured out the proper syntax. The speakerphone is okay, but could be louder. We love that you can flip the phone over during a call to engage the speaker. It's a great trick stolen from the Touch Pro2's playbook.
Using the phone on AT&T's HSDPA network in the greater Dallas area, we were impressed with the call quality we heard on the Samsung Jack, though these Samsung smartphones have always made calls that sounded good. The phone showed only 3 out of 5 bars of signal strength, but calls never dipped or dropped out unexpectedly. Battery life was very impressive. Most of the device's weight comes in the whopping 1480 mAh battery, which gave us almost 8 hours of talking time in our tests. This is very competitive, especially against the BlackBerry Curve, which gave us similar results even though it surfs a slower, less power-hungry EDGE network.
For calling features, Windows Mobile is one of the best smartphone platforms for contact handling and keeping track of calls. You can start searching your contact list from the Today screen by simply typing a name. Once you've made a call, the phone attaches the call log information to the corresponding contact. The Samsung Jack also includes all our favorite calling features, including speaker-independent voice dialing, easy conference calling and an adequate speakerphone. We wish there was a dedicated button for voice dialing, a feature that is nice to have while driving, but instead there are dedicated keys for the speakerphone and volume muting.
Calls on the Samsung Moment sounded very good. We heard some slight background hiss during a few calls, but for the most part, our conversations came through clean and clear. On our callers' end, friends reported the same, an occasional bit of static but mostly clear voices. The Samsung Moment got pretty good reception on Sprint's network, usually hovering a bar or two below full service. For battery life, we managed a single call that lasted just over 5 hours. That's close to Samsung's estimate of 5.5 hours, though we'd hoped the AMOLED technology would bring some power savings and longer battery life. In a full days use, we never had to recharge the phone, but by suppertime on day 2, our Samsung Moment was begging for juice.
The calling screens and call management features on the Samsung Android come straight from the basic Android playbook. Once we were connected with our friends, it was easy to add another call for a conference, turn on the abusively loud (the way we like it!) speakerphone or swap audio sources to a Bluetooth headset. But the Moment didn't offer up extra information about our callers, like contact info or upcoming calendar dates, like HTC's Sense UI on the Sprint Hero. Voice dialing made calling much easier while driving, and the Samsung Moment uses Nuance's voice dialing app, the best we've used, for speaker-independent dialing, so you won't need to program a raft of voice tags. Finally, the Samsung Moment gets visual voicemail support, and the visual voicemail app on the Moment looks fantastic. You can even send voicemails that you've received to another person as SMS Voice messages.
To get your contacts onto the Samsung Moment, there are a few good options to synchronize with online services. You can sync automatically with your Gmail or your corporate Microsoft Exchange account. If you load up the Android Facebook app, you can create a smart folder on your phone's desktop that brings together all your Facebook contacts, so you can search by name and face and call your friends if they list their phone number on the social network. One thing that's missing is desktop sync. There's no desktop software for Android phones, so if your numbers aren't stored online, you'll have to enter them manually.
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