Not long after Verizon began to ship the latest update for the Samsung Fascinate, a potentially serious and life threatening bug has been discovered affecting emergency calling when using the pattern-based lock screen. Making matters worse, the bug seems to be intermittently affecting certain phones and not others, increasing the difficulty of pinpointing the cause in the update.
The bug centers on the Emergency Call button becoming useless after the update as shown in this video with the pattern lock being the only way to use the dialer, defeating the purpose of the button as it’s supposed to bypass the lock in order to contact emergency services.
As all cell phones in the US must conform to the FCC’s guidelines on Personal Safety Access Points, the existence of such an intermittent bug is cause for concern, since there’s no way to know whether a phone is affected until after the update is applied.
