they merge both into one signal meter on my storm..lol How is that supposed to help me? who knows.... 🙄 😳

Generally, 3G is not used for the voice product most people use. 2G is sufficient for this. Some customers could theoretically use 3G for VoIP voice, but truly, that would be data too.

Down the line, I'd personally expect most carriers to start using 3G and 4G to handle the voice product once the footprint is big enough.

For now though, signal indicators are just variance between manufacturers and software versions. Don't quote me on this part, but I'm pretty sure when you have one that just says EV, the bars are measuring your average strength from all sources, be it EV, 1x, multiple cell sites, etc.

Verizon pda's have 1X EV signal indictators, even the tour and storm. On the bb they are together side by side.

andy2373 said:
I’ve read a review or two on the new BB Tour that have said call quality was great on VZW’s 3G, which seemed a little confusing.

Congratulations, you have just found a reviewer who has no idea what he's talking about. 🤣 (not that it's an accomplishment- somebody says something stupid on this board almost every single day!)

In fact, you'll notice that the "EV" signal indicator on your VZW phone completely disappears while you are actually ON a call.

It only shows up there when you're not on a call, because the phone can't even tell how much 3G signal is available when it's busy completing a 2G voice call.

Why would the phone care about 3g if it was in the process of a call? All the phone needs to make the call is the 1x signal. EV isn't needed. For the caller, knowing their signal strength of the call is more important than knowing if you can get the Mets scores after you hang up, so the blow up the size of the 1x marker to make the strength obvious.

I don't recall making aby kind of a judgment call about why anyone would or wouldn't need something. I'm just sticking to the facts here.