So, due to my extreme frustration with the N86 for it's poor call quality, when dealing with background noise, I went out and tested the Droid at a Verizon store. The Droid, like most Motorola phones, has noise cancelling techology (Cyrstal Talk). Having never had a Motorola phone I wanted to see what this is like.
I have to say it was night and day. There was music playing in the Verizon store and the N86 picked that up and overamplified it, making all kinds of noise while I was talking. My caller said that with the Droid they couldn't hear any background noise at all.
I tried leaving myself voicemail messages on both phones and found the same thing. I will say my voice sounded a little muffled on the Droid, compared to the N86. And the sound in the earpiece on the Droid was not as good quality as the N86, in terms of fidelity of sound reproduction. That said, the Droid was perfectly good. Just not as high quality as the N86. So the irony is that Nokia seems to get every other aspect of call quality right, but drops the ball so badly on background noise it completely overwhelms those advantages.
So hey, noise cancellation works. Go figure. And it's been around for years. Get with it Nokia.