Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The first minute of every phone call is torture now

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 450 posts

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#301

Post by uhtred »

jcpst wrote: post #296

Wow, I didn't realize this was a common enough problem that someone had to write about it. I don't have any of those issues. I mean, I've had a few times where a call was dropped, but that's really rare. One thing that really improved life for me was intentionally never setting up the voicemail on my current number. I am unable to accept voicemail. I've had it this way for 4 years now- I do not miss checking voicemai…

> I didn't realize this was a common enough problem that someone had to write about it

I don't think it is, but The Atlantic is no different to all the other web based magazines / newspapers -- they have to keep churning out articles to keep readers' attention, it doesn't really matter what the content is anymore, we all just need to keep seeing new headlines.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#303

Post by CosmicShadow »

I still remember the awe I got each time I called someone and they also used a BlackBerry and had HD calling and how goddamn good and clear it sounded, like holy shit, I can't believe phone audio could sound this good.

I'm not sure if that was only a Canada thing or not, but you instantly could tell if someone else was on a BlackBerry just by how startling good it sounded. I haven't heard anything remotely good in years.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#304

Post by phh »

gary_0 wrote: post #45
Markoff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not problem of a bezel, but either crappy software or bad sensor, never happened to me through 11+ years of using Android phones with touch screen. Better choose decent phone next time, mind sharing what phone causes you this trouble?

Samsung Galaxy S10e (with recent software). It wasn't cheap. And all my previous Android phones were fine too, but this one only has the little hole in the screen for the camera. There is no sensor.

S10e definitely has a hw proximity sensor under the screen, but Samsung also adds infos from touchscreen to complement this sensor. I used a s10e and loved it, but not on Samsung sw and I never did calls so I can't say much about it.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#305

Post by powersnail »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #278
armchairhacker wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. I tell people this whenever I give out my phone number. Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you, if they want to reach out they can text or email, and I can't imagine many urgent situations where…

> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. [...] Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you I teach an after-school coding class. Some weeks ago, the parents of two children didn't arrive at pickup. After 20 minutes, I called the parents using the phone number listed in my company's system. The parents confirmed they were runn…

Presumably, had silenced call be the social default, the parents would have added your phone number into their contact list on the first day of school, sort of like how you have to add someone on a chat app to talk to them.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#306

Post by wruza »

dzink wrote: post #57

There needs to be a Big(O) table for UX. Number of user interactions and decisions to get to each functionality in each screen size. Then comes prioritization. You can only fit so many buttons and boxes close to the hottest zones of user interaction, especially on Mobile, and even less of them in advertising-powered products. When someone prioritizes the wrong use case on premium real estate and pushes back buttons t…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOMS

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#307

Post by david_arcos »

binkHN wrote: post #262
tristor wrote: post #188

I have never had any of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods w/ an iPhone and a MacBook since AirPods came out. My issue with phone calls is 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere. It's completely fixable, but American telcos make money off l…

My Pixel phone has largely solved this for me. The built-in Call Screening is stellar and I don’t get bothered by robocalls much anymore because of how well the phone handles these.

Same here! "Call Screening" killed all the robocalls, or potential robocalls.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#308

Post by glonq »

tristor wrote: post #188

I have never had any of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods w/ an iPhone and a MacBook since AirPods came out. My issue with phone calls is 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere. It's completely fixable, but American telcos make money off l…

I get far more robocalls than real calls.

I really appreciate the call screening feature of Google's Pixel phones!

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#309

Post by stepanhruda »

2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #49
pavlov wrote: post #22

Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails. It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email. It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, sh…

> It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function. If you don't want that, wouldn't a pad be a better option than a phone? Besides, how would you handle calls from landlines and such?

Hah, no it's not, I don't even have the phone app on my home screen unless I search for it.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#310

Post by robomartin »

My first thought before clicking through to read the article was: This is about the torture of using automated receptionist systems.

It was bad enough when you had to go through a wall of numbers. Now, with speech recognition, it is probably ten times worse: "In a few words, tell me what...". I am so sick of it I usually end-up saying something like "attendant" or "real person" repeatedly until the thing drops down to the last "else:" statement and connects me to a person.

As far as some of what the article covers, this is one of the reasons for which I still use wired earbuds. The wires have never been a problem. I just don't want to deal with the nonsense. For example, I was watching a movie in bed on my iPad one night. The wireless earbuds disconnected and sound came blasting out, waking my wife.

In addition to this, CarPlay implementations just seem awful. Not sure if this is on Apple, the radio manufacturer, the car maker or a combination. Just yesterday, my 2020 car simply refused to connect to my iPhone X no matter what I did. Most of the time it works fine. Yesterday, I could not get CarPlay to come up if my life depended on it.

Post reply on HN