If you’re on Three UK and one of the odd people who still prefers to have an actual conversation using your mobile device instead of struggling to get your fat fingers to hit the tiny buttons on your keypad or touch screen, then boy do we have some good news for you. Sometime during the third quarter of this year, Three is going to turn on HD Voice support, and best of all a majority of the devices they currently offer already support the technology, namely the HTC Desire S, Nokia C7, E7, N8, and Samsung Omnia 7. Don’t feel left out if you don’t have any of those, as owners of the HTC Desire HD, Nokia C6, C3, X6, X3, E52, E72, 5230, 6720, E5, E55, Sony Ericsson Elm, X10 Mini, Xperia Play, Xperia Arc, X8, and Xperia Pro will be getting a software update by the end of the year that enables HD Voice functionality.
Now what exactly is HD Voice and is it really any better than what’s currently on the market? In a nutshell, HD Voice uses a wider range of sound (50–7000 Hz) versus traditional voice (300–3400 Hz) thanks to a Wideband Adaptive Multi-Rate codec (WB-AMR). More bits, better sound. Easy as that. Check out the video above to really get a sense of how much better it actually sounds. Like night and day if you ask us. Now of course there’s a catch to all this, you’re only going to get HD Voice calls if you call another person who also happens to be on Three UK. They say they’re working on cross-network HD Voice calls, but failed to provide a timeline as to when that’s going to roll out. The only other operator in the UK to support HD Voice is Orange, who launched the services a year ago, but almost no one is taking advantage of it as far as we’re aware.