Another Android SMS Bug That’s Unresolved
So Google finally got around to fixing a 6 month old SMS bug that sent texts to the wrong recipient and now they have to deal with an older one – over a year in fact. According to ZDNet users get a low storage warning and cannot receive text messages until they delete older texts and when they do that the SMS they were waiting for is gone. This is occurring on stock ROMs. To date Google hasn’t acknowledged this bug so those of you who thought your phone would do all of those things a phone does…well give them another year to make the phone more phonish.
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davidk
10 Comments
Uh, no comment
Yeah that’s right AOL, no comment, good move. Because if you did make a snide “no comment” kind of comment then I’d have to dump a partial but still very long list of “execute arbitrary code” vulnerabilities that became big news but Microsoft didn’t do shit for longer than six months from drive by web page attacks, sometimes good sites (like ours in fact) that had a malicious SQL injection to take over Microsoft machines.
And you’re seizing onto some SMS shit. Who still uses SMS anyway over email? Why not use email, or maybe Google Voice for free sms? That’s an option you have I believe, using Google Voice to some extent on your Focuses.
Oh boy this one’s a year old, not six months, the zdnet crowd is restless! Better call my broker to dump my shares because only idiots will buy an Android phone or use any other Google product or service after this shameful nonsense.
There you go. Jumping to conclusions again. Point is this is a year old and first time I read about it. Just shows that nothing is perfect. All devices and platforms have issues. That’s fair and balanced. I have been accused of sometimes bring out the worst of WP7, but if you don’t talk about it nothing changes.
Oh, and BTW if you missed this one, aside from business use, email is dying. Tweeting and texting are today’s preferred method of communication. And also, nothing is free. You are paying for your SMS and Google Voice every time you purchase something advertised through Google. Penny here, penny there. Don’t think you can find a chart for that but it happens nonetheless.
Funny, I thought I was the one explaining the no free lunch thing to you yesterday. I guess my point was that, while you may get your free service which does the job for you and these other incidents I was going on about, almost every state having sued them at one time or another or whatever, are peripheral and unimportant to you in terms of your choice of email providers, I was curious what would this company have to do, where would you draw the line, an example, that would turn you off to them and begin your migration elsewhere? Are you serious that you are filling me in on the idea behind advertising or were you trying extra hard to be a schmuck?
“Texting” these days encompasses SMS, MMS, email, even blogging as long as it involves typing on and looking at a phone or I suppose an iPod Touch. You got people buying a phone, putting in their Gmail address (on rare occasion their AOL address I suppose), good chance that phone’s email is quick to receive and send. People are running out of reasons to pay extra to send 160 alphanumerics. I doubt email is dying, I suspect SMS is dying, I know communicating over social networks like Facebook and Twitter is increasing but I also remember imagining that over the past decade, more people and communicating more and more. I doubt there is a email volume chart headed south. Were you just throwing that out there or do you happen to have any source on that?
So, author of this post, any idea — a wild guess will do — how many people were affected by this text messaging bug? Bugs plural, whatever? If you want to double or nothing that $50 you owe me, using relatively random sampling data (IE don’t go to the Google help thread on this topic but to some forum’s custom Android rom threads, PMing people at random) and poke around (without mentioning our site that much) until you find someone who tells you “Yeah actually as a matter of fact my Android phone DID send random text messages, rat bastards” either before or after the patch was released and you may keep your fifty. On the other hand, you know that that won’t take a half hour and I hope your time is more valuable than that.
Google Voice is now porting in numbers. They call that a big deal in our world. You already know enough off hand to write an article without a source, so why don’t you see what happens if you do it, having “digested” the news or whatever that stupid word in our domain means, instead of staring at ZDNet for raked muck about little bugs. Took a half year / a whole year to get noticed by alarmist anti-Android blogs, makes me picture myself labeling dealing with that issue a low priority relative to the other things my company was doing.
Challenge for you, a serious one: How about you and I, and no cheating until we agree to do this and on a time to start and a cutoff time, you write about what Microsoft produced today and yesterday and I’ll do the same on Google, let the audience vote which of our respective lists contained the greatest apparent over all utility. Who was more prolific technologically.
I think twenty minutes to make such a list then one of us ten minutes to merge them into a single post with a vote thing is about right in order to make it interesting.
I haven’t been staring at my feeds today, there’s nothing in my head that thinks that today is the right time to do this bet other than yesterday’s Google Voice announcement. Only thing making me think like that, which is at the same level on any given day, is that it’s simply more Google’s MO than Microsoft’s to innovate.
I’ll make it even easier on you — points are valid even for Microsoft accomplishments that are clearly clone jobs of Google’s work (even though Google should get those points…. gotta entice you here).
Alternatively you could be lame and concede defeat right now and say Oh yeah well at least Microsoft’s new stuff doesn’t fail all the time like Wave and Buzz, compare the stock performance this week, whatever you gotta do. Let me here you say game on.
Hey Jim what would happen if you got pulled over for texting and told the cop “No, look, I was blogging — check the timestamp on that post, that was four minutes ago!”
All right that’s enough, time for OC.
I don’t know Doug. I don’t text and drive? What would happen if you were writing an email and a cop pulled you over? WTF. When I find the article I will be sure to forward it to you.
Man.. are you deliberately baiting me? I said texting, contrary .. Texting in today’s world encompasses SMS< MMS, email, blogging, so much so that not only is emailing while driving just as illegal in whatever states in which it's illegal, they probably don't even bother to specify any definition of the word. No need for a forward from you But I just wrote one for you if you're interested.
Text messaging
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Text messaging or texting refers to the exchange of brief written messages between fixed-line phone or mobile phone and fixed or portable devices over a network. While the original term (see below) was derived from referring to messages sent using the Short Message Service (SMS) originated from Radio Telegraphy, it has since been extended to include messages containing image, video, and sound content (known as MMS messages). The sender of a text message is known as a texter, while the service itself has different colloquialisms depending on the region: it may simply be referred to as a text in North America, India, Australia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom, an SMS in most of Europe, and a TMS or SMS in the Middle East and Asia.
Courtesy of netlingo.com
texting
a.k.a. texting, text message, person-to-person messaging, p2p messaging, SMS
The act of typing and sending a brief, electronic message (less than 160 characters) via a wireless network to another person so that they can view the short message on any number of mobile or handheld devices, such as a Blackberry, a cell phone, a PDA, a handy, or a pager.
As more and more people send text messages to each other (especially in Europe and parts of Asia where it is appropriately referred to as SMS), they are increasingly using acronyms, chat acronyms, shorthand, and smileys since the screens on mobile devices keep getting smaller and smaller — see: microbrowser and microblogging.
Let’s get even more specific! The most noticeable feature of text orthography (a method of specifying the correct way of using a writing system to write a language) is the use of single letters, numerals, and typographic symbols to represent words, parts of words or even noises. For example:
b = be
2 = to
@ = at
x = kiss
When graphic units are used in this way, they are technically known as logograms or logographs (or in the case of some languages, characters). Logograms in texting may be used alone, or in combination:
b4 = before
@oms = atoms
2day = today
xxx = kisses
zzz = sleeping
Pictograms or pictographs, on the other hand, refer to visual shapes or pictures that represent objects or concepts. For example, emoticons and straight-on smileys are pictograms, and are also known as ASCII art. For example:
🙂 = smile
😉 = wink
:-@ = screaming
(*o*) = surprised
(^_^) = cute
Historical perspective: In July 2005, in the U.S. there were 81.7 million text message users over 13 years old, while April 2008 saw that figure increase 37.5% to 112 million. These users sent 48 billion messages monthly and 363 billion annually, an increase of 448% since 2005. In 2009, according to TNS Global, 74% of the world’s digital messages were sent through a mobile device in January 2009, a 15% increase over the previous year.