The Verizon Wireless HTC Eris 'Silent Call Bug'

Hall writes "In the last few months some users of Verizon Wireless HTC Eris phone models have encountered what's being called the 'silent call bug' with their phones. What has happened since the update to Android 2.1 is that some phones get dead silence (can't hear the person they call nor can the other end hear you). The only solution is to reboot the phone, though the problem will re-appear after some time. VZW tech support for a while was simply swapping out Eris phones in hopes that the replacement didn't have the same issue. Too many were, though, and now some users have been told they're not swapping anymore. A couple of days ago, a user witnessed a car accident and was unable to call 911. Well, at least not until after rebooting the phone."

Comments

A movie comes to mind.

[sethstorm]

What good is a phonecall if you cannot speak?

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[hedwards]

In this day and age, chances are if you can call 911, even if you don't say anything, that they can use the devices GPS to find you. They do it precisely because they don't have any way of knowing whether or not you're dying in a ditch. That was the primary reason why GPS technology found its way into cell phones well before they gave people access to it.

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[PitaBred]

You're completely mistaken. Cell phones got GPS well after consumer units had appeared, because there were no small GPS chips that would easily be powered by a cell phone battery until relatively recently.

The reason they could find your location before GPS was a thing called triangulation. They could (and still can on phones without GPS) check your signal strength to various towers to figure out where you are because they know the geographic location of all the towers.

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[Anachragnome]

"In this day and age, chances are if you can call 911, even if you don't say anything, that they can use the devices GPS to find you."

Did the 911 call center actually get GPS coordinates though? I'd be interested in knowing how this looked from the their end. Did it look like a hang-up with no GPS data sent? Isn't the GPS data sent over the same data channel?

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[icebike]

Depends on the 911 system used. Some small departments don't have the money to upgrade their equipment. Really rural counties out west are simply using telephones with recorders attached.

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[mutube]

Did the 911 call center actually get GPS coordinates though? I'd be interested in knowing how this looked from the their end. Did it look like a hang-up with no GPS data sent? Isn't the GPS data sent over the same data channel?

I used to work in an ambulance control in the UK and we received mobile phone location information through the same mechanism that gave lookups from phone numbers to street addresses. At the time I don't think GPS in phones was widely available, instead information was passed using a point, ellipse angle, and radius reflecting 'error' in the calculation, with which you could plot on a map a rough area where the call was coming from. When I left in 2004 they were upgrading to software that would do this plotting on maps automatically (address lookups were already plotted automatically).

The triangulation system provides varying degrees of accuracy depending on whether in built up (many antennae) or rural (fewer, more powerful antennae) areas. Thankfully, that also matches the accuracy usually needed for dispatching emergency help: a traffic accident in a rural area, even if giving a 5 mile radius, can sometimes isolate a single road which combined with local knowledge will pinpoint the likely location. In a city where 5 mile radius would be less useful accuracy was usually down to less than 1 mile. On one occasion it was accurate enough, with prompts from what a caller could hear nearby, to pinpoint someone to a back garden in a suburban estate.

I suspect that if GPS data is fed through to the controls now it will be in the same format, albeit with much lower error rates on the ellipse.

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[rhook]

Yes they do, the phone reports GPS data to the gpsOne server that the provider operates. This data is mostly used by many applications and the E911 service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GpsOne

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[hoggoth]

You could have really freaked her out with:

"Collect call from OhGodNoHelpAhItHurtsLordHelpMeMakeItStopHuffHuffHuffUnnngh"

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[Tintivilus]

The reason they could find your location before GPS was a thing called triangulation. They could (and still can on phones without GPS) check your signal strength to various towers to figure out where you are because they know the geographic location of all the towers.

Your description is correct, but that's not triangulation, it's trilateration. From signal strength one can derive a distance but not a direction. The technique is drawing circles of to see where they meet, rather than drawing lines to see where they cross.

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[delinear]

[...] having to reboot is not a "fix".

Clearly you've never done tech support.

Hail Eris

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling a phone Eris is sort of asking for it..

Re:Hail Eris

[ScrewMaster]

Calling a phone Eris is sort of asking for it..

Yeah ... kinda like naming a space telescope after someone whose name rhymes with "trouble".

Re:Hail Eris

[AndrewNeo]

Prepare for trouble! And make it Hubble!

Re:Hail Eris

[mysidia]

Wikipedia:

Eris (Greek , "Strife") is the Greek goddess of strife, her name being translated into Latin as Discordia. Her Greek opposite is Harmonia, whose Latin counterpart is Concordia. Homer[*] equated her with the war-goddess Enyo

[*] Homer the ancient greek poet, not Homer Simpson

We've come a long way

[BitZtream]

Remember back when you had to find a land line to call for help?

Now we're up in arms because a wireless device is not 100% reliable and it became very clear in an emergency situation.

Does the public really expect their cell phones to flawlessly or have I been using smartphones so long that I just accept wireless devices suck still?

Re:We've come a long way

[tomhudson]

Remember back when you had to find a land line to call for help?

Now we're up in arms because a wireless device is not 100% reliable and it became very clear in an emergency situation.

... and those hard-wired phones would have been just as useless in this case - a car accident.

... and good luck calling 911 from outside your house to report that your house is on fire.

Better to have something that works 99.999% of the time pretty much everywhere, than 99.999999% of the time in only one scenario.

Re:We've come a long way

[Sir_Sri]

Flawless, no. But it's a reasonable expectation that your phone should have a failure rate comparable to other phones on the market. It's also reasonable that if a problem exists that puts the failure rate of your device well outside industry norms (think xbox360) the device will be repaired or fixed both for free and in a reasonable timeframe.

In canada for example we have laws that require cell phones, even ones not attached to a plan, and with no carrier, can connect to 911. It's a nightmare for 911 if they call and cannot give a location, but if I buy a cellphone in canada I can expect that it will connect to 911. I don't know if we have rules about downtime, dropped calls or silent calls, but I'm sure there are large tomes of requirements that all the companies have to comply to for all sorts of stuff. I can expect that those will be followed, or the CRTC/FCC will send in the lawyers.

Cars get recalled for defects/repairs, so do drinking glasses from MacDonalds and children's toys, my cell phone falls somewhere between those points on a spectrum of cost and utility, and yes, your life can depend on it, just because we 'got by' with landline phones doesn't mean they didn't cost lives, there just wasn't anything you could do about it.

I took my battle.net authenticator off my iPhone and got a physical one precisely because as you say, smartphones fail a lot, I've had to reinstall the OS 3 or 4 times so far (iPhone 3g) and it spent 14 hours updating to iOS4. Not exactly my idea of a reliable device. But my GF has a nokia dumbphone, which has never had an OS update, and never needed a reboot, so maybe since my phone cost 10x as much as hers, (+ data plan) I can expect better reliability, and won't be looking to apple to replace my smartphone. People don't buy a Lexus rather than a regular old toyota for the fun of it, premium markets (which I count smart phones as part of) do still have problems, but you're paying for more functionality, not less, and a phone that can't make calls is by definition less functional.

Re:We've come a long way

[icebike]

Remember back when you had to find a land line to call for help?

Now we're up in arms because a wireless device is not 100% reliable and it became very clear in an emergency situation.

Does the public really expect their cell phones to flawlessly or have I been using smartphones so long that I just accept wireless devices suck still?

We expect phones to work for their intended purpose.

Being able to make a call and then not hear anything isn't acceptable. Occasionally you can't call due to reception problems, everybody understands that. But being able to complete a call and not hear is clearly a warranty issue.

Re:We've come a long way

[bonch]

Well, yeah. If you pay for a cell phone, you have a reasonable expectation that it's going to work. Your argument is like saying we shouldn't care about leaks in the roofs of our houses because our ancestors used to live outside.

Re:We've come a long way

[MartinSchou]

but you're paying for more functionality, not less, and a phone that can't make calls is by definition less functional.

I hate to tell you this, mate, but a phone that can't make phone calls is, by definition, not a phone.

Re:We've come a long way

[Sycraft-fu]

I think part of the problem is too many people view phones as toys first and phones second. People get extremely bitchy if they can't have games and cameras and all that other shit on their phones. The market for "Just a phone" phones has nearly completely disappeared, nobody wants to buy them even if they cost less.

Way too many people I encounter buy phones based on their shiny features, and never consider call quality. Ex-roommate of mine was completely unintelligible on his phone. The thing had a totally crap microphone and looking online, that was a common problem with the phone. He just texted all the time. My though it "Why the fuck would you get it?"

Personally I've become a real fan of my Curve 8330 because of this. It is a smart phone, but the phone features seem to work no matter what and are not interfered with by anything else. Had good call quality and a decent antenna too (as well as being nice and cheap). Not the shiniest toy around, I don't have an ultra high rez touch screen, but I can pick up the phone and make a damn call when I want to.

I'm certainly not opposed to smart phones, obviously I have one, but I think consumers need to spend a little more time looking at the phone side of things and less time worrying about the shiny. If consumers start caring more about the phone, so will the manufacturers.

Re:We've come a long way

[maxwell demon]

I would expect my cell phone to work flawless for it's main function, making phone calls, provided there's no hardware defect, it has power, a working tower is in reach, and the network is not overloaded. I accept that non-core functionality may fail. I won't accept if the one defining functionality, which is making phone calls, doesn't work due to design or implementation defects. That's a proven technology, it's no rocket science, and it should be tested like hell.

Re:We've come a long way

[Icebreaker]

I work for verizon wireless and yes verizon is wanting to fix this problem asap. the real problem though its not a network issue its a device issue and htc has their heads stuck up their ass and is not fixing it. Verizon cannot fix the issue since its a software issue and we don't make the software htc does. So blame htc and their shitty programming and poor quality control. So basically verizon is getting upset customers but has no resolution other than waiting for HTC to fix it.

ha

[papasui]

Steve Jobs is a moron for making such a shitty phone! Oh wait...

payback

[fermion]

I recall many were saying that the problem with iPhone was that it was too hard to use as a phone. Well, at least, if you went through all the hoops, the iPhone actually works. The biggest issue is dropped calls, in which case you just call the person back.

A reboot indicates something like a memory leak. Hardware problems would not be reliably fixed. This is certainly some brain dead software error, a case of development focusing on the bells and whistle, and not core functionality. Everyone is so wrapped up in the tethering and Apps, that they forgot they were building a phone.

Re:payback

[Loomismeister]

Tethering is an almost effortless addition to a phone that already uses the internet. Apps are for the most part developed by 3rd party members that never even contributed to the core functionality of the phone to begin with.

To blame this problem on the development of apps and tethering is silly, and I think the only reason you mentioned tethering was because that's one thing the iPhone lacks.

Re:payback

[stephanruby]

When all the 39 different Android phone models are having the same issue, then may be you'd have a point, but the thing is the Droid Eris is only one phone, and a low end one at that (low resolution, low 5 MP camera, no 4G, slow CPU from an older architecture, no physical keyboard, very cheap price).

Gloating about the problems of the Droid Eris would be like an Apple-hater gloating about the fact that the iPod Shuffle is a piece of crap. That very well may be true, but it's not very relevant to the users that only buy the higher end flagship devices for themselves (and would only give the cheaper iPod Shuffles to their six year old kids anyway).

Re:payback

[Loomismeister]

Him saying that android devs care more about bells and whistles (like tethering) is the cause of the phone calls not working is the same thing as blaming tethering.

HTC didn't make the OS, and yet you are blaming the Android OS for this problem. You are blaming the open source community of focusing on making apps which is somehow hurting the quality of the actual phone capabilities.

HTC's track record is actually pretty great; They make plenty of customized phones, and they did wonders in making a usable front-end of the microsoft OS.

Yet none of this really matters, the point is that this guy made a silly comment. It is not development of apps that caused this problem, and it wasn't trying to catch up to the iPhone either.

Sometimes shit happens, and it's how companies handle that shit that matters. Apples track record is really crapping up, especially when they told users that they were holding their phones wrong because of the shitty antenna design.

Re:Phones which can not make phone calls

[PitaBred]

Even crappy phones still have an OS. I've had call issues with many different phones, not just smart phones. And many times the issues were solved with... you guessed it, rebooting the phone. Sometimes I even had to remove the battery.

Obvious...

[grub]

You're dialing it wrong.

Done this for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, I have been rebooting my Windows Mobile phones for years to make calls. The competitors are only now catching up?

You Think That's Bad...

[pandrijeczko]

...what about an Eris owner trying to call a left-handed iPhone 4 owning friend who just happens to be holding his iPhone 4 by the wrong corner at that particular moment - they have *NO* hope of talking to each other.

Nexus One

[nrgy]

I had this very same problem with my Nexus One. Even worse rebooting did not always solve the issue.

I bought my Nexus at launch and while I was happy with it at first, the past few months it just started acting crazy. Icons on the desktop would open a different application, the issue from the article, the keyboard opening when a phone call was coming in "you couldnt slide to answer because it was ontop".

After all that and more, once the lock button on my Nexus started to give out I just went back to my iPhone.

Can you hear me now? Nope?

[aristotle-dude]

Maybe all of those Android fans of Verizon shouldn't have been making fun of the iPhone. Payback is a bitch.

Re:Can you hear me now? Nope?

[mmcxii]

More like being a fanboi makes you a bitch.

Every product has defects, every product has failures. Its a fact. Creating great expectations from any product or brand is setting oneself up for disappointment.

Re:Phones which can not make phone calls

[Darkness404]

Not really because when was the last time you upgraded your firmware on it? In general "dumb" phones are pretty disposable, if there is a bug like this on a "dumb" phone (and, there are) the chances of getting it fixed are zero. With a smartphone, chances are there will be an update within the next month that corrects the issue.

Any issue in a "dumb" phone never gets fixed, issues in smartphones might though.

Can you hear me now?

[masmullin]

Can you hear me now?
...
....
*bzzzzzzzz*

Re:Phones which can not make phone calls

[0123456]

if there is a bug like this on a "dumb" phone (and, there are) the chances of getting it fixed are zero.

Which probably means that the QA is a lot better too, in order to ensure that it doesn't ship with crippling bugs.

Rebooting your phone?

[RightwingNutjob]

At the ripe old age of 24, even I find this ridiculous. If cell phone programmers designed commercial autopilots, no one in their right mind would fly. If they designed ECU software for Toyotas, oh wait.

Re:Voice is so 90s

[larry bagina]

My city police set up a number for SMS messaging emergencies. They cancelled it after three weeks: too many dick-pics, goatses, and not a single legitimate emergency.

Quick question

[LynnwoodRooster]

Were they holding it wrong?

Apple must be pissed

[maccodemonkey]

Someone has officially outdone the iPhone 4. Apple is going to have to work hard to compete with this one. Perhaps hiding the phone dialer entirely until a reboot?

Re:Voice is so 90s

[Vegeta99]

Why didn't they do what they do when you prank-voice-call 911? You know, send a cop to chastise you?

Re:Sucks to be poor

[MadnessASAP]

My mom used to hope that I wouldn't ever come back.

Re:Sucks to be poor

[FatdogHaiku]

I know what you mean. When I was a kid my family relocated several times... but I always found them...