I have reached the conclusion after great study, that the speaker phone on the 8700c is crap. One of the big glitches is that when you are on a call and you are using speakerphone, if the other end of the call has background noise, they can't hear you, but if you go to handset mode they can hear you just fine. I have also found a delay when speaker phone is activated, like a 3 second lag before anyone can hear you...

my 8703e speakerphone was great, this is crap..

(tested on 3 different 8700c's)

Yeah, I was gonna say, it must not be across the whole 87xx line because I'm pretty happy with my 8703e. It is significantly better than the Q I had prior.

Let me ask a newbie/dumb question.

What is an 8700c,e, etc? And how do I know which one I have.

My 8700 is Cingular but on About page it just says 8700.

tia

P.S.

Why would anyone use a speakerphone in a noisy environment anyway?

8700"c" stands for Cingular. If you have the Cingular logo on your 8700 body, it is an 8700c (also metallic blue in body color).

re read my post..I did not say I was using the speakerphone a noisy environment

Looks like this....

sounds like this..

But then again, the whole "e" thing at the end of the Verizon phone will throw a wrench in the naming convention.

Did each 8700c have the latest software installed?

correct...the letter at the end has No meaning with respect to the name of the carrier

Yes, and also every other version was tried as well...

8700g , here, TMO version. "g" stands for g-g-g-g-g-g-great!

(And no problems with the speakerphone, it works g-g-g-g-g-g-great also.)

Well, mine looks like the photo posted by hailer and, fwiw, the speaker function seems to work ok.

Haven't had the 8700 long enough to have used speaker a lot yet, but several dozen calls have been fine.

And the speaker phone option is a lot better than the one my 7290 had.

I thought the speaker phone on my 8700 was awesome..... *shrug*

The 7290 had speaker phone? LOL...

the speakerphone on my 8700c works just perfect with the latest cingular os release... im not experiencing the problems your describing... personally i use my HS655 a lot and the times i use speaker phone its just fine...

I don't use speakerphone on my 8700c much but it has worked fine as I recall. The mic, on the other hand, is really bad about picking up background noise.

My 8700c speaker phone sounds great, loud and clear, always has been.

YES! The mic is a problem too...

The 8700c or the 8700's have another glitch where if you use the speakerphone in a call and set the volume of the speakerphone all the way up and adjust the ringtone volume to the loudest the ringtone volume will only ring according to the speaker phone volume.