191–200 of 275 posts
My experience has been Pixel phones suck for calls in general. I know of 3 people with Pixel 3As that intermittently can’t receive calls. Often it takes 2-3 calls to these people in order to get 1 to go through. Setting the phones to prefer 4G has so far fixed the problem most reliably but the whole calling stack on pixel phones needs some work IMO.
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Linus Tech Tips has one complete with an isolated private 5G network inside. I’m sure Google could manage.
Intrigued, looked up... hm. and am still wondering what they plan to do with that. 1: https://firecell.io/product/labkit/
They noticed cell phone reviews over time have dropped signal or quality testing. Which makes sense since each reviewer is just testing in their local environment with no standards or baseline so they were pretty meaningless anyways.
Are they going to be able to test enough phones and wifi/radio equipment to make it worth while? Not too sure.
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Pixel 6 on AT&T, I don't think I've ever had this experience. Phone calls sound much better than my previous carrier (some cheap mvno) and things generally Just Work. Only complaint is that it's missing some things I hadn't realized were not stock Android, such as per-app volume control. I just might switch back to LG after this one dies, though the battery seems to be holding up much better so who knows.
Switching back to LG might be difficult; they are no longer making (Android) phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Electronics#Mobile_devices
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Jeez - can't dial 911, randomly dials 911. I don't understand why these devices can't even do the most core feature of a phone properly. This will sound crass but the development teams (right up to CEO's) should be dragged out to the gallows and flogged. If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping, and not rested for a minute until any bugs were solidly quashed - up…
I can hallucinate couple different explanations for that: - Modern software is way too overcomplicated to take seriously. - 911 is handled too specially, leading to oversights by implementers. - Feature importance to you has nothing to do with implementation difficulties. etc.
I tried to use my old pixel 3 recently as a hotspot. Blows my mind how it’s been broken for a while (according to online) and won’t ever be fixed since there’s no more software support. I ended up buying a used iPhone SE instead.
There should be some kind of test number twin of 911 that works exactly the same (without SIM, supplying E911 data), but just plays a pre-recorded message optionally with some "debug" info.
That is such an obviously good idea I'm surprised it doesn't exist. Apparently the official way to test it in the UK is to email them and schedule a test. They say they use the real 999 because that's the best way to guarantee that it works, and that's true - but there's definitely utility in having an almost-real number that you can test at any time guilt free. They probably just can't be bothered to set it up tbh.
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Safety is definitely one of Apple’s key marketing points—you might have seen their ads for fall detection/emergency SOS on the Apple Watch or car crash detection on the iPhone.
Nope, I have not
But more seriously, they do spend a lot of money and effort marketing those features and it must work well enough to be worth it.
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How are you doing this? Dialing an emergency has never happened to me by accident on Android or iOS. It has happened to me many times on office phones where you need to use 9 to route your call. And you learn to just stay on the call if you dial me mistake because they will call back if you disconnect and telling them it was a mistake if much quicker. They must deal with it all the time
Happened to me twice with an iPhone. Both times I triggered it when the phone was lagging for some reason (eg it got too hot and throttled down). I guess iOS doesn't track the delay between button presses properly when it's overloaded. I was able to cancel the call in time, but it's a horrifying seeing the timer go down while mashing the non-responsive stop button.
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Jeez - can't dial 911, randomly dials 911. I don't understand why these devices can't even do the most core feature of a phone properly. This will sound crass but the development teams (right up to CEO's) should be dragged out to the gallows and flogged. If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping, and not rested for a minute until any bugs were solidly quashed - up…
I can hallucinate couple different explanations for that: - Modern software is way too overcomplicated to take seriously. - 911 is handled too specially, leading to oversights by implementers. - Feature importance to you has nothing to do with implementation difficulties. etc.
but if that would be my implementation I would track call in some very simple way and if that's second or third try to call 911 within hour then handle it as ordinary call without that extra functionality as a safeguard
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Can't you stand up your own test network for that? Other phones won't connect to that, so you don't need to fully rf isolate, as long as you have some trust in the test network not doing crazy things. It's well over a decade ago, in Europe, and I was only very peripherally involved, but it didn't seem that hard to get permits for such a test network indoors.
I think the problem is, 911/112 calls are routed through the best cell network available. This means that if somebody is close enough to your lab, their phone would still try to use your femtocell.