Preventing pocket dialing to emergency service (112)
Today something happened to me for the first time that shouldn't happen to anyone: I somehow pocket dialed to emergency service (112).
The device was in my front jeans pocket, screen facing to my leg, and I was lifting some boxes from under the table to the table and vice versa. And right after that I heard a woman answering the call. (I don't know if the speaker turns on automatically when making an emergency call, or was that turned on also by mistake.)
I'm also pretty sure my lock time (30 mins) was reached and the device was locked by the lock code.
Pocket dialing to emergency services should never ever happen, because it drains on emergency service operators time, and there might be someone else in the line needing help for a real emergency. So how to prevent those?
People noted that the SIM card connection is lousy (search for "SIM" on togehter.jolla.com):
jgr ( 2014-01-04 03:04:09 +0200 )editNope, that didn't happen. I didn't have to enter my PIN. But I guess the same emergency call button is on the unlock screen...
make ( 2014-01-04 18:39:08 +0200 )editThis is somewhat related to this question but it's not an answer - so let's have a comment then:
At least on my device you can have a call to 110 accidentally while the device is locked. This is bad as 110 is an emergency number in number of countries like in Germany where this is a number to Police and in Norway where it's number to fire department). All you have to do is three steps:
Note, that no number was selected by me, the field showing selected number was absolutely empty. Thinking about these three steps I would say it's pretty much possible to make 'pocket calls' to at least 110 while the device is locked.
EHyde ( 2014-08-19 10:46:48 +0200 )edit@EHyde: when device is in pocket, proximity sensor is supposed to block the swipe, so step 1 is blocked, so emergency call is not possible unless you have broken hardware in the device. 2. If proximity sensor would be broken it would still be unlikely to get touch events pressed in the area of emergency button, you have 5 touch presses before emergency button is hidden, so taken the area of whole screen the change is a few % times the few % in step 3. So even if your proximity and light sensor would be broken the change for pocket call is in the area of under promille.
rainisto ( 2014-08-19 11:02:10 +0200 )edit@rainisto: yes, sure, I see that it's unlikely. And it's clear that ultimately you just can't 100% prevent it from happening. But on the other hand, once you have millions of devices around (sure you will, or even more!) unlikely events starts to happen every now and then...
But actually my point is that I was surprised to see that you don't have to select any number when you get to emergency call dialer, just hitting call is enough to make a call to (almost random) number. Should it be it be something to explicitly selected by the user? If so the likelyhood of the pocket call to emergency number turns to even more unlikely.
EHyde ( 2014-08-19 11:29:09 +0200 )edit