Talk:Pocket dialing

Outstandingly important article
Surely such an outstandingly important article needs someting on it's talk page? (Just kidding)

As the article is called "Pocket Dialling", but there are several mentions of 'butt' dialling in the text, I intend to change them to 'pocket' for consistency. There is also an extra mention of keypad locking (it's a short article) which I may remove as well.

Must admit(COI?) that I don't own a mobile/cell phone, so I have limited experience in this area. Would suggest that putting a phone in the 'butt'/hip pocket is a good way to break it! --220.101.28.25 (talk) 09:27, 17 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks; I too continue to resist the call of the cell; I performed the butt merger but neglected to trim the butts. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:26, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Mechanical Reasons
The article describes what pocket-dialing is, but not how it actually occurs. A brief description of the mechanics of how and why it occurs would be useful (at least for those of us who either don’t have a mobile phone or have ones that are immune to it). Synetech (talk) 04:27, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Could add info from point of view of non emergency services recipient
This info could be added to the article: when a general member of the public (rather than emergency services) receives a pocket dialled call it can cause them inconvenience as it ties up the phone. Hanging up the phone doesn't disconnect the call (this might not be true for all countries). Unplugging all phones from their sockets does (at least in some countries it does). Not Invented Here, Yet (talk) 07:55, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
 * The statement that it ties up the recipient's phone line is already there, in the Consequences section. That it is a cause of inconvenience is obvious.  I don't see that there's anything more to add here.  Though it might be worth finding out more about whether unplugging the phone disconnects the call and the extent to which this varies between the world's phone systems. — Smjg (talk) 17:35, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
 * But what country is this? One of you seem to be from the UK but [//security.stackexchange.com/questions/100268/does-hanging-up-on-a-uk-landline-call-not-terminate-the-connection] suggests since exchanges went digital (i.e. long before pocket dialing was a significant problem), calls on BT landlines should have been cleared within 3 minutes. Discussion there suggests in Germany and possibly several other European countries, the disconnect was instant or close to it. IIRC this was also the case in Malaysia. I think it was and is also the case in NZ. [//forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2197076] suggests 90 seconds in Australia. [//boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=658052] suggests it was probably generally at most 120 seconds on modern (i.e. when pocket dialing became an issue) exchanges in the US. So I'd be interested in hearing what countries didn't or don't allow the receipient to disconnect the call when pocket dialing became an issue i.e. long after they'd moved to digital exchanges. Nil Einne (talk) 16:03, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

What phone call ends from voice mail?
I'm not aware of any phone that terminates a conversation after X amount of time and is then transferred to voicemail. Voicemail is when a call is unanswered. This is in response to last sentence in intro paragraph: "A pocket-dialed call can continue for many minutes, or until the recipient's voice mail system ends the call."
 * I agree it's a bit confusing but I'm assuming the point here is that the recipient may not have personally picked up the call. If your pocket dial you generally aren't going to hang up just because no one is answering so if the recipient doesn't answer and has voice mail set up (or if they've turned their phone to auto voice mail) the call will go to voice mail. I believe I have received a pocket dialed voice mail before and definitely plenty of people have. Nil Einne (talk) 16:04, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 2 one external links on Pocket dialing. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Attempted to fix sourcing for http://www.wlwt.com/news/18854575/detail.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090501063657/http://www.911dispatch.com:80/911/911_misdials.html to http://www.911dispatch.com/911/911_misdials.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 07:34, 20 January 2016 (UTC)