World’s first and only HD voice based phone launched by Orange

Since the past 10 year we haven’t seen any upgrades on the voice transmission. This is one of the few areas where we haven’t seen much development. Lately, on 09.09.2009 in 09:09h sharp, Orange picked Moldova for the birthplace of the first HD voice call.

Orange preferred to call this as the new HD voice standard as they believe that it is another way of naming the use of a better audio codec in the transmission of voice. It is also a known fact the higher-quality encoding is only possible over the 3G/HSDPA network as it apparently uses a higher bandwidth and it could be that for this reason Orange Moldova has recently upgraded their network to support 14.4 Mbps HSDPA.

Orange proudly presents its first and only phone equipped to support high-definition audio that is Nokia 6720 classic version. Nokia 6720 classic version will be a special handset that supports the AMR-WB codec used for the encoding of the HD voice calls. The Nokia 6720 classic HD version is available only in Moldova’s Orange shops for a price of around 260 euro. Once the device becomes a hit Orange has plans to expand their HD Voice service to other networks throughout Europe with UK and Belgium as their starting zones which is all set to go until the end of 2010. Apparently, we will be seeing a range of HD-voice-capable phones until then.