Orange has officially released the long anticipated 'HD voice service' in the UK. Starting from today, British customers can pick up a HD Voice enabled handset including the likes of the Nokia 5230, X6, E5 and Samsung Omnia Pro.
The HD voice is said to offer “crystal clear” phone within the 3G coverage. A wider speech bandwidth adds clarity to the caller’s voice and helps to suppress external noise. Road works, noisy traffic etc.
Conversations are apparently a lot easier to interpret, even if the recipient is in a noisy environment or has hearing problem as Orange showed off in their public trial.
If you want to hear for yourself, head over to Engadget who have audio samples of Orange's latest breakthrough. Though this has started as an Orange revolution, the network have said that it expects other companies to pick up this open standard.
Unfortunately current owners of the aforementioned handsets won’t be getting a software patch for the HD upgrade even though no extra hardware is involved. Apparently the manufacturers need to sell new phones to stay alive. Hopefully the latest Android and Windows Phone 7 devices will also get a taste of the latest in sound quality.
It's great to see that the standard features like calling and texting are not being neglected in favour of more fancy things. But I doubt HD texting will ever happen.
Via: Engadget