According to the ever-alert spies over at pocket-lint, those crackly, distorted, sounds-like-your-talking-from-the-bottom-of-a-swimming-pool telephone calls could soon be a thing of the past with Orange pledging to roll out HD quality calls by Q3 2009.
Orange plan to make these improvements by implementing the Adaptive Multi Rate-WideBand codec, or AMR-WB for short.
The good news is that it will reportedly bring calls to a much higher level of quality and clarity, and should also result in far fewer drops; we all know how annoying they can be!
The bad news is that in order to achieve this increase in quality phones will need to be compatible with the AMR-WB codec; and more than that, for the best performance increase both handsets will need to be capable of translating the codec. Oh well, sounds like a good reason for that handset upgrade when it rolls around.
Orange says HD voice will be with us by Q3 of next year and we say not a moment too soon – Gaj-it.com is very much looking forward to the end of static, crackle and stop.