By One great feature of the Google Nexus One is the fact that it has TWO microphones. Basically, one microphone is positioned directly on the “mouthpiece” while the other microphone is positioned away from the mouth. While the first microphone captures your voice, the second captures your voice along with background noise, compares the two, and is able to transmit a signal with the overlapped background noise deleted/removed/reduced.
The call quality of the Nexus One was reviewed as excellent and the 2 microphone technology, referred to as Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), is the reason. The microphones used to accomplish this are called Microelectromechanical Systems Microphones (MEMS) and iSuppli thinks more and more mobile phones will begin using the tech – great news for consumers.
It’s also great news for people in the ANC business as iSuppli is predicting global shipments of MEMS microphones to be 1.2 billion in 2013 compared to a previous estimate of 1.1 billion. That “.1” sounds like a small number… but for non-Doogies out there it is 100,000,000 extra units because of growth in the mobile sector.
I’ll definitely take this technology into consideration when making my next phone purchase because hey – it IS a phone and call quality should still be a top factor in the decision making process… right?
[Via Cellular News]
blackberry has been doing this for years, good to see someone else pick up on it
I would also like to see someone copy the blackberry feature where when you holster your phone and it locks the keys and puts the phone in sleep mode
And hate to break it to the 20,000 Nexus owners, but as far as Android phones go, the Droid had this first. It’s situated right in the center top of the back side of the phone. Nothing to see here…move along…move along.
this feature in fact WORKS excellent. (Nexus One)
a few days ago, I was with a friend in a crowded applebees (game night), he has an iPhone, and he didn’t believe me on this, so he called his fiance from my phone telling her he was still in his office, and she believed him (he was just tricking her), he asked her “dont u hear all the people in here screaming?”, she didn’t hear anything, the he called her again from his iPhone and she heard everything and he was amazed.
To be honest, I didn’t think it was going to work as well bc the place was CROWDED and LOUD, but it, in fact works.
@velazcod N1 for the win. I knew it. This phone is amazing, and your story too!
The Motorola Droid has it too. I guess HTC adding it is news because the sound quality of some of its WM phones is poor any improvement to the hardware is welcome.
I love my Nexus One and this is just another one of the reasons why I do, the Noise Cancellation IS excellent! Try it for yourself if you don’t believe it.
This feature was on the Droid also…not a new revolutionary thing.
Cool to see, believe it or not, the Grateful Dead pioneered this idea and technology, to eliminate background noise, echo and feedback. They perfected this in the early 70’s, some of the sound people went on to work for sennheiser later on. This was the early start to noise cancelling tech.
http://www.hometoys.com/ezine/09.04/hinton/garcia3-mics.jpg
Slight correction:
“While the first microphone captures your voice, the second captures your voice along with background noise, compares the two, and …”
The real idea is that the lower mic captures your voice and the background noise, and the auxiliary mic captures mostly just the background noise. It can then use the auxiliary mic’s signal and “subtract” that sound from the sound that the main mic picked up, leaving you with only the sound of your voice being transmitted.
It’s similar to another technique that aims to remove or lessen the vocals on a music track, because most recordings will have the instruments in only one or two channels of the audio (especially rear channels), but the vocals are usually on at least 3 channels (front L/R and center), sometimes more. So by canceling out the audio that is common to all 3 channels, you can usually reduce the sound of the vocals, leaving only the music, which can be useful for things like karaoke machines.
Moto RAZR 2 did this a while back, called it crystal talk
Blackberry does this with one mic only, way dif than the nexus one.
Android rules
HTC Touch Pro 2 also has this feature, its out there quite a bit more than people may think