For those of us old enough to remember the days before mobile phones, the era of landline domination had a couple of advantages compared to the incredible computers we carry around in our pockets today. First and foremost is voice quality, you simply can’t get the same type of fidelity on a mobile phone than you can on a regular landline, but with “HD Voice” that’s no longer the case. Sadly, it isn’t yet widely rolled out, and in the countries where it does exist, the UK comes to mind, there’s no inter-operator HD Voice support, meaning if you’re on Three and call someone using Orange, despite the fact that both of you are on HD Voice enabled devices and on HD Voice enabled networks, you’re still not going to be on an HD Voice call. Second, and this may or may not be a big one depending on how chatty you are, is caller ID. When someone calls you it’s one thing to see a string of digits, it’s another thing all together to see a first and last name. Looking to bridge the gap, T-Mobile has become the first operator in North America to offer caller ID to their mobile customers.
The service is enabled by a company called Cequint, and according to their website their software supports multiple types of operating systems, but the first two devices to receive caller ID support are the Samsung Exhibit 4G and HTC myTouch 4G Slide, so for now we can assume that this is an Android thing only. Now if this was free, we’d say fantastic, bring on the innovation, but it’s not. It’s going to cost you $4 per month, which makes it yet another useless perk offered by operators, similar to $5 per month ringback tones.
Besides, most people schedule their calls these days, and often don’t even bother picking up if they don’t recognize the number calling them.
[Via: Phone Scoop]
