Cell phone voice quality: The last frontier

As we reported earlier, LG Electronics said it will introduce cell phones with noise-reduction technology later this year to help clarify conversations in noisy environments. It sounds promising because cell phones—despite making great strides as multimedia, Web-browsing, and messaging devices—still fall short on voice quality.

But don't get your hopes up just yet. Motorola has offered cell phones with a noise-reduction technology, called CrystalTalk, for more than a year. Several of them, like the Moto Z9, RAZR2V8 and RAZR2V9, are in our Ratings of cell phones (available to subscribers).

Our findings: These noise-reduction Motorolas performed no better or worse than other phones in our Ratings.

At CES Motorola introduced a new crop of phones with CrystalTalkPlus, including the Tundra, a ruggedized cell with push to talk (PTT) capability. (Click on the image at right for a closer look at the Tundra.) The phone will be available later this month from AT&T for $200 with a two-year contract. Motorola's CrystalTalkPlus seems similar to LG's new offering, in that the phone uses a second microphone to monitor background noise and then make volume and voice-quality adjustments via software and a special digital sound processing (DSP) chip.

We'll be interested to see if this new crop of phones does better at addressing this nagging cell shortcoming.

—Mike Gikas