Saturday 23 June 2007

Pic of the day: It is 00:41AM. Do you know what your mobile phone is doing?

The cell phone strikes again

Earlier this spring/summer I had a problem with my mobile phone / Pocket PC randomly calling a number from its memory. I was aware that this might happen and usually after a telephone call, I briefly call my own mobile phone from my mobile phone, then immediately turns off the call. That way, if it tries to call because it rubs up against the leather case, it will try to call a number that it cannot possibly reach.

During this previous stint, this did not work for some reason. Instead it called the last inbound number, at random times of the day (and possibly night) depending on when it was pressured by the leather. At least it would not call when I was asleep, but then again I don't sleep at the most normal hours, so it may well have called well past midnight. It is anybody's guess what they may have heard. I don't even know for sure whose number it was.

Then I came up with a revolutionary idea. When the Pocket PC (HP iPAQ) starts after a reset (not just turning it off and on, but pressing the hidden reset switch) it forgets the PIN code for the SIM card. (Why can't I play The Sims on it even though I have a SIM card? ^^) Without the code, I cannot call with it, it says, except emergency calls. Fine, because I don't want to make calls with it! I just want it for other people to be able to contact me.

What the phone / Pocket PC failed to inform me of, was that it did not accept calls either. So for the last x number of days (weeks?) I have not been reachable on my mobile phone. Not that people try every month. Sometime around that, though. And I had given my mobile phone number to North Corporation when I handed the computer in for repair. It is unlikely that they have fixed it yet, but if they did, I wouldn't know.

So now the phone is back to freewill mode. On real mobile phones, there is a key lock combination that you can use to prevent this. But this is not a real mobile phone, it is a "communicator", a Pocket PC with a built-in mobile phone (and Internet access, and GPS). The longer I use it, the more sure I am that it was a mistake in the first place. This is the future, but the technology needs to mature for a few models yet. Perhaps in a couple years we'll have a design that really works and does not do crazy things. Whether that is possible while running Windows is anybody's guess.