I like a phone call to hear the voice of the person I am talking to, and I tend to prefer it over text. With an actual phone line it was even more fun due to the much lower latency.

Now it seems like there is large (200ms+) delay on almost all phone calls - it makes it really hard to have a conversation even.

Business is still done in large part over the phone - when you need an answer soonish (and/or know that you’re not going to get an answer when you need it), phone calls are about the only thing that works reliably.

Latency is infuriating. Bluetooth is particularly bad and calls where both ends are using Bluetooth are pretty miserable. It seems the norm these days that net calls with earphones and wired networking are lower latency than cellular calls.

If you have a complicated issue that you need to resolve where the options branch deeply, or that person has been ghosting you on other methods[0], a phone call can clarify things very quickly.

If I have anything that is even moderately complicated to resolve, I will call customer service. Even though the wait times are brutal, I tend to get my problem solved faster that way.

[0]: what is to stop that person from ghosting you on the phone? Redial. Then curiosity will kill the cat.

I like phone calls to discuss lengthy topics.

Typing everything out sucks, especially if it's on my phone.

How did õ affect SMS? Count as multiple characters?

Normally an SMS was up to 160 characters long. If you wrote a longer text than that then it would be a separate SMS and the telco would charge you extra. Because Õ is only really used in Estonian it's not part of the set of characters for a standard SMS. This meant that the presence of Õ in an SMS would make the max length of an SMS 70 characters (less than half).