Realistically, if you care about software/hardware quality at all in your smartphone, there are only two options: Iphone or Galaxy S phones. Anything else and you have to be ready to face a bunch of problems.
Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
81–90 of 275 posts
Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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How's that boot taste? Contacting emergency services is the one thing a phone must not fail at. We mandated legacy telecos to maintain switching offices with a weeks worth of battery power so landlines could work in a natural disaster. Google is a trillion dollar company if you want to get their attention you have to effect them on the order of millions of dollars.
> We mandated legacy telecos to maintain switching offices with a weeks worth of battery power so landlines could work in a natural disaster.
Not disagreeing with the topic at hand but this isn't even consistent anymore. When they switched to FttN for DSL in my area I noticed the batteries for the nodes only last a day before they die and I lose landline service.
Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
#83Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call. Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the cal…
How are you doing this? Dialing an emergency has never happened to me by accident on Android or iOS. It has happened to me many times on office phones where you need to use 9 to route your call. And you learn to just stay on the call if you dial me mistake because they will call back if you disconnect and telling them it was a mistake if much quicker. They must deal with it all the time
I had this happen with my iPhone a few years ago. Basically there’s a setting where some combination of the side buttons pressed together calls 911. I was in a borrowed car and the cup holder was just the right width to do this when I hit a bump.
The very nice 911 operator told me it happened all the time. After the second time it happened I tracked down the setting to disable it.
Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
#84I had a Bluetooth keyboard in a backpack turned On in the trunk of my car while driving .... random key presses while driving from bumps in the road managed to dial 911 ... or make the phone think it was an emergency and 911 was called. Not fun.
The keyboard was spamming gibberish, eg NN nZzz1457_+-5hhhsvb .... etc
It took me a while to figure out why the phone appeared possessed...
Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
#85Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call. Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the cal…
Jeez - can't dial 911, randomly dials 911. I don't understand why these devices can't even do the most core feature of a phone properly. This will sound crass but the development teams (right up to CEO's) should be dragged out to the gallows and flogged. If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping, and not rested for a minute until any bugs were solidly quashed - up…
I can hallucinate couple different explanations for that:
- Modern software is way too overcomplicated to take seriously.
- 911 is handled too specially, leading to oversights by implementers.
- Feature importance to you has nothing to do with implementation difficulties.
Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
#86It shouldn't be allowed to be sold and Google should be facing fines for each day the functionality is missing, assuming it is a software problem.
Radio certifications should be suspended if there are protocol conformance issues, I think there are precedents to it.
Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
In lots of countries it's also possible to call emergency numbers without a sim card.
When you take the SIM out of an iPhone (or turn off your eSIM), it displays “SOS” instead of a carrier ID.
Yes, because 3GPP defines requisite emergency call flow, and FCC require phones able to make emergency calls without SIM. It's not a gesture of generosity.
Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a confirmation dialog would defeat the purpose of an auto dial here — you need the auto dial because you have been incapacitated.
Apple's approach is to give you some fixed amount of time to cancel before it auto-dials an emergency number.
Pixel does the same, but the amount of times it triggers automatically can be different...
Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
#89Funny, because I have the opposite problem. My Pixel dials 911 out of random and I always have to race to disconnect the call. Just last night my Pixel Watch started ringing out of random while I was eating dinner and it said it was dialing 911. I saw a phone call pop up on my Pixel 6 phone but fortunately canceled it before it connected. My watch didn't even tell me why it dialed 911, and once I disconnected the cal…
Jeez - can't dial 911, randomly dials 911. I don't understand why these devices can't even do the most core feature of a phone properly. This will sound crass but the development teams (right up to CEO's) should be dragged out to the gallows and flogged. If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping, and not rested for a minute until any bugs were solidly quashed - up…
If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping
For what it's worth, every telco switch upgrade I performed ages ago, early days of GSM the first number I tested was 911. I made sure the dispatcher could hear me. I don't know whats going on with the phone development side of things. That seems like a QA and customer feedback review problem. It probably also does not help that wireless vendors are slow/hesitant to update phones. There is a fear of bricking phones and customer support nightmares their words, not mine. I could flash update a phone over the air but this was in the 90's. No idea what that process looks like now. I assume they stage an update on a CDN after hopefully testing it extensively. Do all cell phones have two boot partitions in the event the upgrade process is sub-optimal(c)?
Re: Some Pixel owners still can't dial 911 during an emergency
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jeez - can't dial 911, randomly dials 911. I don't understand why these devices can't even do the most core feature of a phone properly. This will sound crass but the development teams (right up to CEO's) should be dragged out to the gallows and flogged. If it was my product I would have made damn sure the 911 experience was perfect before shipping, and not rested for a minute until any bugs were solidly quashed - up…
I can hallucinate couple different explanations for that: - Modern software is way too overcomplicated to take seriously. - 911 is handled too specially, leading to oversights by implementers. - Feature importance to you has nothing to do with implementation difficulties. etc.
Yes, I think the real problem is #2.
The only reliable way to test 911 features is a test lab, to which the average engineer doesn't have access to. On top of that, calling 911 isn't exactly as placing a normal call - so the only way to test is... to call 911.
Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer. Plus, they most likely don't have a way to automatically test these changes - or they might happen as part of other "features" (remember the Microsoft Teams bug that caused similar issues?).
In the end, the smarter our smartphones become - the dumber they are at doing the one single thing they were initially meant to do - get help in case of an emergency.