GSMArena feature lab: Enter new goodies

Speakerphone loudness test

Having a handset with a nice loudspeaker is a definite plus for almost every user. Most modern handsets have a speakerphone function, sometimes advertised as a built-in hands-free. Having the voice of the other calling party sounding loud and clear is obviously a must. Teenagers on the other hand like to use the loudspeaker to listen to music on their own outings or get-togethers (yeah, we know the sound quality sucks). But stepping out of these scenarios, you would hardly need us telling you that every phone is as good as its ringing. After all, that's its primary job - alerting you of incoming calls.

So one way or another, whether you use it for fun, conference calls or just for plain ringing, there is one single thing that's important - loudness. We've never dug into that in our reviews besides the casual subjective remark of whether the handset ringing is loud or not, but we decided it's time we took a more scientific approach.

So we got ourselves a nice piece of equipment - a digital noise/loudness meter in order to start measuring objectively that all-important aspect of modern handsets - how loud is the loudspeaker in realty.

Our noise/loudness meter

The equipment in question is not a high-end one, but we really don't need one. All we need for our reviews is a way to measure the maximum (peak) loudness level that our handsets reach.

So, for the record, here is how our test setup goes. We do our tests in a quiet room taking sound measurements with the handset loudspeaker facing the microphone at a distance of exactly 1 m. We do three different tests. For each test we make several consequent measurements - we usually disregard the highest and the lowest readings and we take the average value of the rest. The three tests are as follows:

1) A phone ringing. We use an old-school ringtone, resembling the ringing of an old phone. It seems that most phones do well when we use it.

2) Pink noise. We use a sample of pink noise. Our readings with it are pretty indicative on how well the handset loudspeaker would fare with common music. Teenagers would surely appreciate the handset that will allow them to crank up the volume as high as possible.

3) Human voice, male. This is an important test, since if you tend the use the loudspeaker for speakerphone purposes, loudness is really important, no matter if you are at the conferencing room, or in your car.

So, all this pretty much sums it up nicely. Let us just point out that this test is not about the quality of the sound produced by the loudspeaker. A mild, relatively deep sounding loudspeaker that soothes the ear won't do well in this test. But, all we are after is pure loudness levels - it's our hunt for the loudest phone, ever.

And one final remark so you can interpret our readings better. We measure sound loudness in decibel (dB). Bear in mind that the decibel is a logarithmic unit, which means that a reading of +3dB represents roughly twice more power. Although power itself doesn't have a direct relation to our test, it just comes to show that even a slight difference in readings might mean audibly louder results.

Finally, as we do all this with the mobile user on mind, we would really like to know how helpful our effort is. We hope the new features are bringing extra value, but with them our reviews take longer to complete. And we're hoping to strike the right balance between added functionality and timely serving our audience. We welcome any of your feedback on how useful and relevant our add-ons are. Your opinion matters to us.