As an almost teenager at the time, that (Shazam over the phone with an answer texted back - which I used on a Nokia 3310) was the one thing that convinced me we would soon have pocket devices that really could do anything.

And while it took a few iterations (for me, from palm pilot to blackberry as a teenager, then eventually moving to iPhone after a few too many painful Blackberry upgrades - still missing that unified inbox though, as is everyone else I know who had a BB of that era... and frankly missing a great physical keyboard on a phone, too) I still am impressed on a daily basis that I do indeed have the device in my pocket that 12 year old me dreamed of.

I didn't know it ever worked that way, that's incredible. Reminds me of ChaCha, the texting service where you texted questions and a human would quickly look up the answer and text it back. It's a very cool idea that was quickly outmoded by smart phones and is kind of lost to history now.

Funny enough, even Google used to do that... before smartphones and the Google Assistant, you could text GOOGL (46645, I think) a query and get back a quick answer: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2004/10/get-411-with-46645.h...

They eventually shut it down :( https://slate.com/technology/2013/05/google-sms-search-shutd...

I remember Sony Ericsson handhelds all came with TrackID back in the day (2007/2008) and I used it to name music I heard in public. It was the same idea. I think it charged £1-2 per track!

Back then phone quality was much better. Cellphones killed that.

What? HD Voice using VoLTE or WiFi Calling is miles better than any land line phone

I'd take a landline over the inconsistency of cell calls any day. Maybe peak/maximum quality is better with today's tech, but reliability definitely isn't. I would bet average quality of calls has dropped too. HD voice is a carrier specific thing, no? Most of the time I can barely even hear the other person, much less have HD anything.

I think you have been misinformed. Voice calls over plain old telephone service were band-limited to <4khz decades before cell phones became popular. This was necessary in order to cram more active calls into our existing telephone infrastructure.

Digital phone calls today are way better.

Today's g.722 (HD Voice) is better, but GSM codecs are also 8kHz sampled, then lossily encoded. If the compression is appropriate, gsm is 13-bit per sample vs 8-bit per sample commonly used for POTS (minus robbed bit signalling in the US), but if the compression isn't appropriate, you get some pretty nasty artifacts. Encode/decode delay can be significant in some applications, but since GSM is TDMA anyway, you're going to have buffering and may as well use that to encode; a T1 PRI multiplexes one sample at a time, so a lot less delay there.

I’m sure that’s all true. I’m also pretty sure I wasn’t regularly shouting into my AT&T landline “I can’t hear you!” Obviously we’ve gained a lot with cell phones and portable music playing but it’s been mostly at the cost of consistent quality.