A few weeks back, I reviewed four smartphones in conjunction with a handful of IT executives. In that review, I briefly touched upon the annoying buzz the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) phones caused when sending or receiving a communication in close proximity to speakers—radio, computer, car, auditorium, whatever.(Specifically, that the BlackBerry Pearl seemed to yield more buzzing than any of the other phones we reviewed.)
Recently, I was reminded of this frustrating phenomenon at MIT’s Sloan CIO Symposium when the overhead Bose speakers in the main auditorium began buzzing like disgruntled honey bees. I looked directly to my right to find the guy next to me tapping away maniacally on his BlackBerry. He didn’t even notice the buzzing, but there were a number of smiling faces across the room that quite obviously did. All day, I couldn’t help but notice how many handhelds were in use around me. BlackBerrys, Treos, iPaqs, T-Mobile Dash phones, various Motorola and LG handsets and plenty of others I didn’t recognize at first glance. And nobody could stop playing with themselves for more than a minute or two, be it during a session or while networking.
Let me start by saying that regardless of the title of this blog post, the buzzing speaker issue is by no means caused only by BlackBerrys. I chose the title based on my own experience with the handhelds and the fact that the Cingular Pearl was the device that caused the most frequent and most pronounced buzz of the four phones I recently reviewed. (That, and because I know many of you are so addicted to your BlackBerrys that you'll read anything with "the B word" in the title.)
To get to the root of the issue, I spoke with Duncan Bradley, Research In Motion's (RIM) director of global market intelligence. RIM is the BlackBerry manufacturer. Bradley explained to me that cell phones cause this buzzing interference when near some speakers or other devices that can resonate radio frequencies (RF) because such devices often feature poor quality shielding mechanisms to block radio waves from being received. The devices act as passive antennas, picking up cell phone radio signals, but they don't have any way to modulate or translate them into anything intelligible, according to Bradley. Speakers or other electronics with higher quality shielding mechanisms yield less buzzing when near phones, he said.
Bradley also informed me that it’s
