Worst Cell Phone Feature Ever: Key Locked Blackberry 8820 calls 911
On Wednesday night, I traveled to Chapel Hill to get a head start on the drive to CED’s annual Tech Conference. The conference was great, but that is another story. While sitting in a friend’s yard, we were interrupted by the Carrboro police looking for someone who had called 911.
My friend Blake Watters, knew immediately it was him. His Blackberry 8820 has a great feature, it allows your to accidentally call 911 while the phone is locked. When in key lock mode, you get three options:
- Unlock Phone
- Emergency Call
- Cancel
I guess some brain trust at RIM decided that instead of accidentally calling your brother or mother-in-law and leaving a garbled message on their voicemail, your phone should be able to accidentally call the police by sitting on your phone.
The best part is that since the 911 dispatcher has access to the triangulation information from the cell towers, they are able to find your withing a couple of hundred feet. The officers were understanding but I could imagine a time when they would not be so interested to learn about the technical reason you made a call to 911.
The crazy thing is, that if you hit a button, before moving the roller ball, it enters a traditional “unlock only” mode, but if you move the trackball first, you get the emergency call option. Basically, they have combined an inconsistent GUI with the ability to make unintentional emergency call.
Intent on to figuring out how this could be disabled, I looked through the demo 8820 AT&T sent me then I called AT&T tech support and they transfered me to Blackberry support, who pointed me to Knowledge Base Article KB12406.
The Emergency Call number is designated by law, and by design the BlackBerry device incorporates this into its functionality. This number cannot be removed or modified.
Short and sweet, no way to disable the feature. Nice job RIM, they recommend you keep it in the included holster that they provide.
October 12th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
It isn’t just the 8820 that does this. I have an 8700c with the same issue (I think anyone who is running the latest OS will have this issue.) I can’t count the number of times that the phone has rang and upon answering am greeted by a local 911 operator questioning my wellbeing. I wonder how many false alarms they get everyday due to RIM’s “ingenuity.” Lucky for me, the operators have all been understanding thus far and have not dispatched the authorities (yet.)
It’s amazing that I havn’t seen more coverage on this nuisance. I know people retreating back to their Razor’s because this “feature.”