Why Mobile Phones Are Annoying 519
griffinn writes "Jakob Neilsen recently conducted a study comparing the perceived annoyance level of two commuters having a face-to-face conversation and one commuter talking on the mobile phone. Interestingly enough, subjects were also asked whether the ring tone is annoying, and people didn't find the ring to be particularly bad."
Correction (Score:5, Informative)
Original article: Andrew Monk, Jenni Carroll, Sarah Parker, and Mark Blythe: "Why are Mobile Phones Annoying?" Behaviour and Information Technology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2004, pp. 33-41.
Re:my pet hate (Score:1, Informative)
That might be because you never start any novel conversation.
MODERATORS: read this guy's posting history and perhaps you'll realize he's recycling posts and karma-whoring like there's no tomorrow.
Re:Here is South-East Asia (Score:3, Informative)
What really annoys me is the people who play their games on their phones with the volume turned up, although you can do this with a gameboy too.
Re:You know what is annoying (Score:3, Informative)
Or you could get an N-gage :)
Re:Ringers not most annoying? I think not. (Score:3, Informative)
-Graham
Re:As Don Jolly would say *ahem* (Score:2, Informative)
...or as he is even better known:
Dom Joly [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Can you hear me now? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is phones without active noise reduction. My T39m works fine with normal-voice-level on a bus. I only have issues in very windy conditions.
Re:Can you hear me now? (Score:4, Informative)
"All of the PCS technologies try to minimize battery consumption during calls by keeping the transmission of unnecessary data to a minimum. The phone decides whether or not you are presently speaking, or if the sound it hears is just background noise. If the phone determines that there is no intelligent data to transmit, it blanks the audio and it reduces the transmitter duty cycle (in the case of TDMA) or the number of transmitted bits (in the case of CDMA). When the audio is blanked, your caller would suddenly find themselves listening to "dead air", and this may cause them to think the call has dropped."
Which comes back around to, if phones had decent microphones -- you wouldn't be expecting the rush of awful background noise all the time.
And no, they don't introduce clicks and pops -- my phone routinely goes silent -- I would blame that on crappy phones.
Re:They're annoying because... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They're annoying because... (Score:1, Informative)
GSM is to CDMA as VCR is to DVD player.
TDMA is to GSM as Wire/String is to Telegraph.
TDMA is to CDMA as Wire/String is VR teleprompt.
With someone with experince in CDMA, TDMA and GSM.
Re:Cell phone annoyance time in theaters (Score:3, Informative)
I'd carry a personal jammer, if they were legal, and flip it on when I was at a theater.