For as long as I’ve been in social situations where noisemaking in inappropriate, I’ve had a crippling, irrational fear of one of my devices making some noise and embarrassing me or worse – my Philosophy professor threatened to take away a letter grade (10%) for every Unauthorized Electronic Device Incident. Like everyone should, I check to see if my phone is off and my laptop muted and, probably unlike everyone, compulsively check the silent status of my phone during presentations and meetings. The worst thing that I imagined was that, despite being on silent, one of my devices would start making a noise and not stop until it was powered off, battery removed, or device destroyed. This is especially frightening whenever I have my Macbook – one of the many reasons I always keep a 10-in-1 screwdriver on hand ^_~
Anyway, my fear was rationalized yesterday, when my silent-mode phone started ringing for no reason and DID NOT STOP until it was powered off. The only indication of a call was a notification email from Google Voice, but there was absolutely no indication on the screen of a current phone call, txt, email, alarm, game, missed call, low battery, or anything. There was no vibration that usually accompanies any of my ringtones. No action I could do from the screen would shut it off and the ringing did not stop until the screen was black and the phone was completely off.
The phone in question is a Droid Pro from Motorola running Android 2.2. I was in my car on my way to work at the time (not in a meeting or in class), but still, in any circumstance, this is a Thing that Must Never Happen. Android is a decent OS and I respect what Google has done in making it an open platform. But openness and freedom and 80,000 apps means jack squat if the core OS sends txts to the wrong people, locks up randomly, doesn’t let you save MMS pics or vids*, or rings forever for no reason. These bugs are extremely rare and difficult to replicate for sure, but their very presence leads one to wonder about the complexity, and thus the quality, of the rest of the codebase… =/
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* another “feature” of the Droid Pro. The way it displays MMS messages doesn’t seem to be the same as on any other 2.2 handset I’ve seen, so it’s probably Motorola’s fault.
