My Fascinate has a HORRIBLE speaker for incoming calls. I can barely ever hear anything and it has nothing to do with reception. In fact, with my bluetooth (highly rated, too: Plantronics Voyager Pro) the sound crackles even with the phone only a few feet away (in my pocket). Ridiculous.
I think Samsung's pedigree probably means that it can do well with display tech, memory chips, and maybe audio tech (Wolfson chip, right?) but not necessarily well when it comes to key components of a mobile phone that impact user experience (microphone, BT, GPS). Just my guess.
I'll say one thing: The wide variety of experiences reported by Fascinate owners simply amazes me. It ranges from the obscenely positive to the utterly abysmal. For example, I went over to a friend's house earlier to attempt to get her Fascinate working again. She was in the middle of a text message and the phone locked up. It had been working fine for days on SuperClean 2.9.2, if I remember right. She simply rebooted it, and when it restarted, it went through the initial setup again. All contacts were erased, yet her phone call history remained. She tried to log back into her google account, but it kept saying a reliable connection to the server could not be made.
I wiped it, cleared cache, cleared davlik, etc. many times. I tried different recoveries, kernels, radios, etc. I tried the new community ROM. I also threw everything back to stock, nixed voodoo, etc.
At stock the phone boots and lets her login to google, but upon a reboot or attempted OTA update, it resets the phone again and asks for all the initial setup mumbo jumbo. It does this every time. Honestly, that phone has been a nightmare for her from the get go. The camera has been great, and she's loved that. She has NEVER had any call quality issues either, and she loves the screen. But software and stability wise her particular Fascinate has been a disaster.
My dad's first Fascinate, a white one, had reception issues up the wazoo. In places he normally got three or four bars with his old phone (and I got three or four with MY fascinate) he was getting only 1-2 bars right out of the box, and dropping calls here and there. Try as they might, Verizon folk couldn't figure it out over the phone or in the store with a tech. They replaced it with a black one. Worked like a charm ever since. Perfect reception, and good voice quality.
My Fascinate has been monkey'd around with quite a bit, as I like messing with roms and kernels and such. But I've never had reception problems. Dropped calls are exceedingly few and far between. Yes, my Droid X was better, but the Fascinate I have is still great. I disabled voice privacy, and that helped with the garbley digital-sounding feel to voice calls a little, but it wasn't that bad to start with. I continue to place calls on it with no problems. My wife is on a 2.2 leaked ROM - haven't had time to flash the community ROM yet, but her Fascinate has actually been pretty darn reliable and stable for the most part.
And here you are with a Fascinate who's phone part sucks. Because of how varied my experience has been with Fascinates (and I have personally used over half a dozen of them, including my brother's and sister's Fascinates as well) I am not surprised you had issues with yours. What a hit and miss phone.
I still partially blame all the crap Verizon puts on it for one thing. There are a RIDICULOUS amount of processes and system apps running in the background on Verizon's stock android build for the Fascinate. It's even bad on this new Droid X2. I really hate all the crap they put on their phones that runs all the time. SuperClean and other ROMs for the Fascinate show how powerful and fast the device would be if it weren't for Verizon. Sad that such a great network has to treat the handset side of their business so poorly. I appreciate all they put into their network, but they need to catch up on the android phone front again.
I thought they had turned over a new leaf with their "Droid Does" push, but now they're back to the same old. VZ finally has a dual core phone, with the same inferior screen as the Atrix, but unlike the Atrix it's months late in coming (not referring to the announced release date, but comparing to when AT&T got their 1st tegra phone), has an inferior form factor (at least in my opinion), a less powerful stock battery, and NO 4G ... or even 3.5G, if you will.
That said, it's still the best for phone calls. 4G doesn't yet affect voice quality in the least, so users who want the fastest phone currently available on Verizon are also going to get the best actual phone.
Samsung's radios are fine. It's their GPS's that sometimes have issues (although I have thus far been blessed with a good one).
