Do you really need a High Def mobile phone? Orange hopes so.

Orange is introducing a new HD service for phones, which it says will mean an end to crackly voices and poor connections. It promises that the quality of voice calls will increase so much that you’ll feel like you’re in the same room. It also means you’ll need to buy a new phone that is HD enabled.

So here’s a quick question for you.

What’s the story?

Orange has decided that your partner shouldn’t ever be hard to hear during a phone call. So it’s introducing a new standard for transmitting mobile phone calls, called WB-AMR. Effectively this will massively increase the bandwidth available for voice calls, but will not require any more network resources. The cost is that phones will require new hardware to access WB-AMR… so if you want to use it, you’ll need a new enabled phone from Orange.

The system was tested in Moldova - apparently because the country only built its mobile network in 2008, and as such it is state-of-the-art. Orange claims to have been planning for HD Voice for two years, investing significant amounts in upgrading its network in preparation for a 2010 launch.

Via the Telegraph

What we think?

I have questions. Can HD calls only be made between two devices that both have the technology in place? Because if so, I really don’t see this as being much of a differentiator. So you buy your HD phone, but you can only call people who also have a HD phone. And that subset of people is very small, because they have to fall into both the “early adopter” category and the “Orange customer” category. You won’t get any decent use out of your HD mobile phone until a LOT more people have them across different networks… at which point it will have ceased to become a differentiating factor. I can’t help but feel that Orange would get more use out of this if it was a larger initial launch.

Although, apart from anything else, it does necessitate network upgrades. Which isn’t a bad thing.