Cricket Wireless has announced that it is now offering HD Voice calling with support for select devices. The list of supported devices is short and includes the Alcatel Idol 4, LG Escape 3, Samsung Galaxy Sol 2 and the ZTE Grand X 4. To use the service both parties must have one of the supported devices and be in an area where Cricket has HD Voice coverage. Cricket does say that other carrier networks may interoperate with Cricket's to allow HD Voice calling, so you may be able to speak to someone on another network using HD Voice.
Besides the limitation of only a few select devices being supported at launch, Cricket has also said that during times of heavy network congestion, HD Voice calling may become temporarily unavailable.
If you don't know what HD Voice calling is, Cricket Wireless describes it as follows:
HD Voice technology delivers high-quality voice calls across Cricket's 4G LTE network. Customers with HD Voice will experience clearer voice quality and reduced background noise. You can talk in a normal voice and be heard clearly even in noisy environments. Conversations will sound more natural, almost as if the person at the other end of the line is right there next to you. And with HD Voice, you can talk while surfing at 4G LTE speeds. 4G LTE and HD Voice are not available everywhere.
Cricket says that those that place an HD Voice call will not see any sort of notification on their phone that they are using the feature, but rather they should be able to clearly hear the difference in call quality.
I'm a bit disappointed to see that only a few select devices are being supported at launch, and none of them are flagships. Hopefully they start pushing out software updates to other devices to enable the feature on them soon, although in my limited experience with the company they are slow to push out updates.
At this point, I would of rather had seen Cricket increase the amount of data included with its phone plans, before launching HD Voice.
So what do you think of this new feature? Game changer or snoozer?