The Verizon Wireless HTC Eris 'Silent Call Bug'

Hall writes "In the last few months some users of Verizon Wireless HTC Eris phone models have encountered what's being called the 'silent call bug' with their phones. What has happened since the update to Android 2.1 is that some phones get dead silence (can't hear the person they call nor can the other end hear you). The only solution is to reboot the phone, though the problem will re-appear after some time. VZW tech support for a while was simply swapping out Eris phones in hopes that the replacement didn't have the same issue. Too many were, though, and now some users have been told they're not swapping anymore. A couple of days ago, a user witnessed a car accident and was unable to call 911. Well, at least not until after rebooting the phone."

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[hedwards]

In this day and age, chances are if you can call 911, even if you don't say anything, that they can use the devices GPS to find you. They do it precisely because they don't have any way of knowing whether or not you're dying in a ditch. That was the primary reason why GPS technology found its way into cell phones well before they gave people access to it.

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[PitaBred]

You're completely mistaken. Cell phones got GPS well after consumer units had appeared, because there were no small GPS chips that would easily be powered by a cell phone battery until relatively recently.

The reason they could find your location before GPS was a thing called triangulation. They could (and still can on phones without GPS) check your signal strength to various towers to figure out where you are because they know the geographic location of all the towers.

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[icebike]

Depends on the 911 system used. Some small departments don't have the money to upgrade their equipment. Really rural counties out west are simply using telephones with recorders attached.

Re:Hail Eris

[mysidia]

Wikipedia:

Eris (Greek , "Strife") is the Greek goddess of strife, her name being translated into Latin as Discordia. Her Greek opposite is Harmonia, whose Latin counterpart is Concordia. Homer[*] equated her with the war-goddess Enyo

[*] Homer the ancient greek poet, not Homer Simpson

Re:Phones which can not make phone calls

[Darkness404]

Not really because when was the last time you upgraded your firmware on it? In general "dumb" phones are pretty disposable, if there is a bug like this on a "dumb" phone (and, there are) the chances of getting it fixed are zero. With a smartphone, chances are there will be an update within the next month that corrects the issue.

Any issue in a "dumb" phone never gets fixed, issues in smartphones might though.

HTC software sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been running CyanogenMod on my Eris for a bit now. I don't have this problem. I can't stand the Sense software HTC provides because it's bloated and buggy.

New? I say nay nay!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had this problem on and off with my Treo on Verizon, and with pretty much every phone before that. Sometimes it would take five tries to get a call through. I blame Verizon's network.

But the Eris isn't without it's problems.

I'm getting ready to send my son's Eris back because the microphone just quit. Didn't even work for voice record. It's also got a flaky trackball. This will be his third Eris. Meanwhile, my wife's Eris makes calls to people while laying on the table. Then they call back wondering what she wanted.

My Moto Droid, on the other hand, has been rock solid, and hardly ever has a bad call. My son is hoping for a couple more bad Eris's so he can qualify for a "lemon" replacement and switch to a Moto Droid. The HTC phones had great promise, but the workmanship leaves a lot to be desired.

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[mutube]

Did the 911 call center actually get GPS coordinates though? I'd be interested in knowing how this looked from the their end. Did it look like a hang-up with no GPS data sent? Isn't the GPS data sent over the same data channel?

I used to work in an ambulance control in the UK and we received mobile phone location information through the same mechanism that gave lookups from phone numbers to street addresses. At the time I don't think GPS in phones was widely available, instead information was passed using a point, ellipse angle, and radius reflecting 'error' in the calculation, with which you could plot on a map a rough area where the call was coming from. When I left in 2004 they were upgrading to software that would do this plotting on maps automatically (address lookups were already plotted automatically).

The triangulation system provides varying degrees of accuracy depending on whether in built up (many antennae) or rural (fewer, more powerful antennae) areas. Thankfully, that also matches the accuracy usually needed for dispatching emergency help: a traffic accident in a rural area, even if giving a 5 mile radius, can sometimes isolate a single road which combined with local knowledge will pinpoint the likely location. In a city where 5 mile radius would be less useful accuracy was usually down to less than 1 mile. On one occasion it was accurate enough, with prompts from what a caller could hear nearby, to pinpoint someone to a back garden in a suburban estate.

I suspect that if GPS data is fed through to the controls now it will be in the same format, albeit with much lower error rates on the ellipse.

Re:And I thought it was just me!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had an Eris since March. It was slow then. As soon as I could root it and flash a custom ROM, I did. The thing is pretty fast now. (Quadrant score went from ~200 to ~340 without overclocking.) HTC's Sense UI really slows the thing down. If you are stuck with your Eris, I highly recommend rooting it and installing an AOSP based ROM. It will not be as fast as a Droid, Evo, N1, etc. There's nothing we can do about that. It's just the hardware. But it doesn't have to be so painfully slow. Mine is not. And, maybe I've been lucky, but I've never had the silent bug. I love my Eris. It's small, light and works very well. It's unfortunate that you've had a bad experience.

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[rhook]

Yes they do, the phone reports GPS data to the gpsOne server that the provider operates. This data is mostly used by many applications and the E911 service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GpsOne [wikipedia.org]

Re:A movie comes to mind.

[Tintivilus]

The reason they could find your location before GPS was a thing called triangulation. They could (and still can on phones without GPS) check your signal strength to various towers to figure out where you are because they know the geographic location of all the towers.

Your description is correct, but that's not triangulation, it's trilateration. From signal strength one can derive a distance but not a direction. The technique is drawing circles of to see where they meet, rather than drawing lines to see where they cross.

Re:payback

[Loomismeister]

Him saying that android devs care more about bells and whistles (like tethering) is the cause of the phone calls not working is the same thing as blaming tethering.

HTC didn't make the OS, and yet you are blaming the Android OS for this problem. You are blaming the open source community of focusing on making apps which is somehow hurting the quality of the actual phone capabilities.

HTC's track record is actually pretty great; They make plenty of customized phones, and they did wonders in making a usable front-end of the microsoft OS.

Yet none of this really matters, the point is that this guy made a silly comment. It is not development of apps that caused this problem, and it wasn't trying to catch up to the iPhone either.

Sometimes shit happens, and it's how companies handle that shit that matters. Apples track record is really crapping up, especially when they told users that they were holding their phones wrong because of the shitty antenna design.