Confession: I Prefer My Landline to My Cellphone by Herb Greenberg at CBN

I must sound older than I feel typing this but it’s about time somebody says it: The quality of a call on a landline is better than on a cellphone.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my cellphone, currently an iPhone 4s. I’ve had an Android, a bunch of different Blackberries, the Palm Treo and a host of pre-smartphones.

I live on my cellphone. It’s the best invention, ever! (After the landline, that is, and maybe the air conditioner, the wheel, the elevator and the light bulb -- in no particular order.)

But there’s this one thing I hate about the quality of a cellphone: There is a split fraction of a second delay on cellphone to cellphone calls that for some reason always makes it seem like you’re interrupting the other person. You know exactly what I mean, and nobody ever seems to talk about it.

If one person switches to a landline, the delay disappears.

I started thinking about this the other day when my wife and I were shopping for a new cordless phone to replace our old cordless phone, which appeared to be having some performance issues. It’s the latest in years of a string of cordless phones, all Panasonic, which ultimately wear out.

Ironically, the quality of our calls on the landline were starting to sound worse to callers than a cellphone. The calls were breaking up as if you were in a bad cell area (which, by the way, we are -- which is why we didn’t cut the cordless at our current home.)

So, off to Best Buy we went to get a new phone. (Talk about feeling old and out-of-touch. Shopping for a new cordless phone is about as exciting as going to Michael’s, the crafts store. Regular old phones are the backwaters of electronics.) We picked another Panasonic, this time the latest and greatest -- a 6.0 mhz Dect. No idea what “Dect” means but it sounded impressive and promised to be the best ever. So we took it home, fired it up and -- same lousy quality.

Returned it and this time bought a VTech 6.0 Dect on Amazon.

No idea if it will be any better, but for the sake of the legacy of my hero Alexander Graham Bell, I’m holding out hope.

P.S.: Best Buy had a display model of the the VTech we wanted, but didn’t have any in stock. So we asked. Turns out it has been discontinued in the Best Buy system. Which gets to the question: Why is it still on display at my local Best Buy? This is worse than dusty shelves. Alas, another story for another day to be titled: Why Best Buy’s days still may be numbered!

Have you experience the same problem? Cell phone or landline. Share it in the comment.