The "push the button and then wait for the chirp to talk" aspect is enough to make me want to throw the things across the room.
But then Half-Duplex makes me crazy in and of itself. I remember when the Nextel phones first came out and everyone was raving about the whole PTT feature and i was like "we've got Full Duplex PHONES - Why would we EVER go back to glorified radios?"
Interesting note about PTT emulation. I worked for Winphoria networks out of Boston (who was later purchased by Motorola, what a win for us who came to work at the little startup) they were a bunch of Bell Labs guys who had designed the first softswitch for land mobile use. They were having a hard time convincing the cellular folks that a few racks of servers could replace 100 cabinets of switching gear and the VC money was burning. Verizon was absolutely up in arms over how to compete with Sprint who had purchased Nextel and was marketing the crap out of PTT services.
This is actually even more interesting because the whole reason the IDEN PTT mode was on the Nextel phones is they purchased 800Mhz land mobile licenses where interconnect is a secondary server to dispatch (2 way radio) so the PTT mode was added for legal reasons. It was immensely popular and Verizon took notice of this.
Guru Pi the CTO of Winphoria was a brilliant dude and he re-purposed our softswitch to provide a PTT expereince over 1xRTT cellular data networks. Our switching nodes were located in the Verizon CO's right next to the data frame for no latency. While latency surely was an issue so was call setup time so they had to keep the data connection up that trashed battery life. The first PTT phones were less than stellar. Side note I bet the coming low latency 5G will finally making emulating a 2 way radio on a WAN tolerable.
Finishing the story, I had gotten the job with Winphoria because they were installing one of these nodes and software geniuses don't know how to read Bell Telephone installation guidelines. Between almost blowing up a -48V BDFB, not isolating the rack from the floor etc. they did not get a warm reception. I never even saw our offices the first 2 months of my job. I was hired and flew straight to Verizon Engineering HQ in Bedminster NJ.
That project was never commercially successful however I earned tremendous respect for the Verizon Wireless engineering team and their quest for excellence. I spend 6 more years with Motorola until the Galvin's lost control of the company and I left to pursue my ISP full time. Never would have gotten back into the production world if it wasn't for this odd chain of events.
A little history on IDEN, Cellular and PTT.
What I need to do is obtain an itinerant part 90 license and build a little repeater for production. This conversation has reminded me that I wanted to upgrade our crappy FRS UHF radios.