Assessing the performance of opportunistic networks requires a subtle understanding of both contact and intercontact patterns. While the analysis of intercontacts has attracted significant attention from the research community, surprisingly only a few works have focused on explaining what happens during a contact. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of contacts using both empirical measurements and reference models. We make several observations that allow us to better capture the adaptive nature of device-to-device (D2D)links. In particular, in the case of Wi-Fi 5, we show that a slight modification of the nominal modulation scheme is enough to achieve an accurate characterization of opportunistic contacts for some categories of propagation models. As a consequence, we confirm previous observations that the evaluation of protocols and algorithms for D2D networks based on links of fixed rate may lead to inaccurate results. We finally propose a tool that extends mobility traces with plausible values of per-link capacity.