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Software Handhelds Hardware

Did Your Code Ever Make Anyone Deaf? 305

Posted by michael from the CAN-YOU-HEAR-ME-NOW dept.
theodp writes "Siemens AG anticipates additional costs from a software problem with new mobile phones that has led retailers to suspend sales. Five models of its new 65 series can emit a piercing melody into users' ears if the battery fails during a call, causing hearing damage in extreme cases, according to a statement."
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Did Your Code Ever Make Anyone Deaf? More

Did Your Code Ever Make Anyone Deaf?

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  • No, but.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:08AM (#10094685)
    it.slashdot.org [slashdot.org] made me blind.

  • No... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ebrandsberg ( 75344 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:09AM (#10094690)
    But if they looked at it they could have gone blind. Seriously, I've seen some messed up code, but deaf?

    • Re:No... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by PeterPumpkin ( 777678 )
      "Hearing damage" is sort of ambiguous I guess. You can lose your hearing in very small increments, only noticable over months or years of exposure. I doubt the phone would be able to output enough of a blast to take out your eardrums.

    • Re:No... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:04AM (#10095026) Homepage Journal
      the thing is that you have the phone pressed against your ear, speaking to someone and *beep* it makes a sound you would hear to the next room.

      it's a stupid double idiotic design issue, first a) the phone makes a very irritating noise when it's battery goes out(meaning that actually the phone turns off itself long before the batt is really really empty, now they might have some reasons like reducing memory corruption, preserving the batt health or something like that) but the second design flaw is the more stupid one: it makes that shutdown noise even if you're making a call(and the batt runs low).

      personally I'd rather have the phone go down in silence and IF there's _any_ juice left let the phone wait untill the call is finished before turning off in a controlled fashion(also, it's less annoying if it just goes off without all the racket).

      • Re:No... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by zerblat ( 785 )
        Actually, I think it's pretty useful that cell phones warns you when your battery is running low. At least on the Nokias I've used, the warning sound means you have a few more seconds to go, meaning you can end the conversation in a meaningful way. Or say stuff like "My cell phone is dying, call Alice inst...".

        Of course, the warning signal shouldn't be loud enough to make you deaf...

      • Re:No... (Score:3, Informative)

        by matth ( 22742 )
        Interestingly my Samsong A310 doesn't quiet do this... but I have on several occassions gone to make a call only to be greeted with the phone going "BEEP" very loudly in my ear and when I look at the display it has returned to the regular "stand-by" screen. I'll tell you, that BEEP is extremely high pitched and loud an dI have yet to figure out why it does it.

  • Where's the QA (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:12AM (#10094700)
    Seems like a simple test case to me: battery fails during a call.

    • Re:Where's the QA (Score:4, Informative)

      by eln ( 21727 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:18AM (#10094733)
      Well, if you keep your batteries charged at least halfway at all times, the phone is far more likely to burn your ear off before you get to this condition anyway. Most cell phones generate enough heat for you to want to end the call quickly far before this particular condition occurs.

      Having said that, I've certainly had cell phones whose "low battery" beeps can be pretty damn ear-splitting when they happen when you're in the middle of a call, but I've never had one that could actually make you deaf.

      • Re:Where's the QA (Score:2, Interesting)

        by APDent ( 81994 )

        far more likely to burn your ear off

        or explode [rcrnews.com].

      • Re:Where's the QA (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        low battery" beeps can be pretty damn ear-splitting when they happen when you're in the middle of a call

        Actually, I think you will find that the low battery beeps tend to occur at the end of your call. I.R. Pedant.

  • Verizon Wireless (Score:5, Funny)

    by 968134 ( 454238 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:13AM (#10094702)
    Can you hear me now? What?

  • Testing. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hot_Karls_bad_cavern ( 759797 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:13AM (#10094703) Journal
    i know you can't cover every corner case, but, er a cell phone hitting low battery is not what i'd consider a corner case. Now, if there was 3rd party this or that crammed in there after the fact (ie customer did that crap), now way to forsee that, but damn....hearing damage? C'mon, if i had to choose one of two options:

    a) batt low, be fucking LOUD to warn of it..
    b> batt low, warn, beep, blink, flash, beep more...and then even more...

    hell, beep that ass off, but loud enough to damage one's ear? Fuck that. No one to blame, but the dudes that made it...period.
    • ....er, no way to foresee that.....

      'tis the beer that makes me type not-so-well...it is Friday night no?

      What? It's Saturday morning? Shit, enough /. off to bed!!!

    • Re:Testing. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Nos. ( 179609 )
      That's just it, wouldn't your low battery indicator be one of the things you would test? Even if it wasn't, if they had done enough testing and betas with staff, they would have run into that problem before releasing it to the customer. Guess speed to market is more important than quality, or in this case, safety.
      • Wrote a post the other day about being discouraged (and pissed) about companies (and ultimately your fellow man) being willing to "fuck ya" just to get a buck, beat the "other guy" to market, and make another buck.

        Burns me up.

        This is just not an "oversight"...surely they tested this....surely. All i can do is sigh and just....fuck it - makes me...just sad. This should have shown up in routine, run-of-the-mill tests...and they shipped it anyway.

        Fuck it. :(

        • Re:My point, exactly. (Score:3, Informative)

          by gl4ss ( 559668 )
          the 'feature' has been in siemens phones in one way or another for quite a few years already.

          this time they just overdid it.

          definetely wasn't about 'saving a buck', just about plain stupidity.

    • Re:Testing. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by stuffman64 ( 208233 )
      My Motorola V120 would beep uncomfortably loud when the batery got low. In fact, it would often cause ringing in my ear and I ended up shelling out money for a new phone because of this (not to mention that the battery would only last about a day on a charge).

    • Re:Testing. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by lucas teh geek ( 714343 )

      b> batt low, warn, beep, blink, flash, beep more...and then even more...

      my phone does this and its fucking anoying.

      "beep beep, im going flat, beep beep, all this beeping isnt helping, beep beep, no way you can stop me, beep beep, beep fucking beep"
      *turns phone off*

      i may as well have no low battery indicator since if it gets low and im not near a powersource with my charger handy, the phone has to be turned off anyway. really fucking stupid design choices, but i guess it's slightly better than goi

  • Can you hear me now? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bill_Royle ( 639563 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:13AM (#10094704)
    Good.

    Sucks for Siemens. Heh... a twofer!

  • Hearing damage = deaf (Score:5, Informative)

    by Capt'n Hector ( 650760 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:16AM (#10094722)
    Any time your ears ring, it's "hearing damage". I play violin, and whenever I practice, and for a few hours afterword, I get a noticable ringing in my ears. It actually doesn't go away fully, I can always hear this ringing (sometimes a lower frequency buzzing) at night. This is hearing damage, but I'm not deaf. However, if this were caused by a cellpone, you bet I'd be suing.

    • But just try to win the case after discovery exposes an admission like yours!

    • Re:Hearing damage = deaf (Score:5, Informative)

      by AlphaPB ( 741406 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:25AM (#10094755)
      The quiet buzzing when you're in a silent place is actually caused by the sound-sensitive cilia in your inner ear vibrating of their own accord when they don't have any external stimulation. This is a normal phenomenon.

      Of course, this is different from the kind of hearing damage that you're referring to. Maybe you should wear earplugs while practising. I wear them at rock concerts. You ought to look into musician's plugs, which have specially tuned noise-dampening responses that are consistent in how they reduce noise levels at various frequencies.

      • Re:Hearing damage = deaf (Score:5, Informative)

        by eliza_effect ( 715148 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:48AM (#10094838)
        A drummer friend of mine has these. They were custom -molded to his ears, and I think they were around $300 AFAIK. High price aside, he said they've pretty much saved his hearing, as he can hear everything just about as clearly as normal, however, most of the harmful frequencies are blocked. You can literally have them in and hear someone wisper, and then go play the drums without hurting yourself.

        • Re:Hearing damage = deaf (Score:5, Informative)

          by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @03:00AM (#10094882) Journal
          There's a broad selection of musician's earplugs [musiciansfriend.com] that preserve a select set of frequencies to aid in pitch transmission, while blocking the majority of the energy in the soundwaves.

          I always keep a pair of regular hearos with me - you never know when you'll need em (for example, you end up having to spend more than a few hours servicing equipment in a noisy server room, you want to catch a nap and want to block out noise, you decide to take a trip out to the range and need hearing protection.)
    • Captain Hector!

      I haven't seen an Escape Velocity Reference on Slashdot before. It's pretty exciting.

      I would write more but Stud Beefpile is chasing after me :-).

      Oh, and because I have never seen this flamewar before, Clarinet is so much cooler than violin.
    • You play violin loud enough to cause hearing damage? Sorry but err, I was in band for seven years, and even sitting/standing directly infront of a full marching precusison line rocking HARD didn't make my ears ring for hours...
      • The violin gets pretty loud when your ear is right next to it. Funny thing is, the more in tune I am, the louder it gets. If I rest on a note for a while, it seems to dig itself in a bit, getting even louder. *shrug* I have a pretty loud violin.

    • Re:Hearing damage = deaf (Score:5, Interesting)

      by obi-1-kenobi ( 547975 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:46AM (#10094830) Homepage
      Its called Tinnitus.
      I have tinnitus
      (I used to have it then it went away... then I was exposed to more loud noises and it came back)

      I went to a Tinnitus specialist (Ear Nose and throat) and got my hearing tested. I have an above average hearing. However I hear ringing in my ears. After you are exposed to loud noise (usually amplified music) sometimes you can hear a almost like putting your ear on a shell... Its like a blowing noise...
      (people who go clubbing know this)

      This initial noise can go away... However sometimes if you are stressed out your mind will hear this noise and it will asume that you need to hear it. Because thoes actual hairs in your ear are now damanged and your mind keeps the sound. Then you will hear the 'ringing noise' in your ears when there is no other noise avaliable.

      This old Russian doctor who I saw told me this:
      "your brain is like a computer, there is no problem with your hardware, this is a software error. You need to learn how to ignore it" (this guy was like 70 years old, really neat old guy)

      The only way to stop it is to releax and have a background noise. If you pay attention to the noise you will get extremely stressed out and it will become worse.

      Your ears will also become more sensitive to louder noises, not really its just that you think to your self loud noise bad.

      NOW the reason people listen (like loud music), your brain percieves the pain in your ears due to the loud noise. It then releases a chemical in your brain that is similar to morphine.
      (according to the doctor)

      • sounds like a hardware problem with a software work-around to me.
        Fortunatly, I sleep next to my computers, so the ringing doesnt bother me much.
      • Now imagine instead of an auditory disturbance in your middle ear, it was a balance disturbance in your inner ear. That's what vestibular neuritis is, which I got last year (presumably from a virus that somehow got through the tympanic membrane into my inner ear, though there were never any substantive middle ear symptoms, probably from blowing my nose too hard, though nobody really knows shit). It's like tinnitus of your balance system. About 6 or 7 weeks of my life were living hell - in a constant stat

    • Three words... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Gordonjcp ( 186804 )
      ... Use A Mute.


      Yes, I know it screws up your tone a little. Better to lose tone than lose hearing. Plus, your neighbours with thank you for it.

  • Maximum volume (Score:5, Insightful)

    by whereiswaldo ( 459052 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:16AM (#10094723) Journal

    What is the maximum volume on this phone? Why not just cap the volume at a non-hearing-threatening level and be done with it? If they don't do that, isn't it just a matter of someone cranking the volume too loud, or is the low battery warning allowed to exceed the regular max. volume level?

    • Design Defect (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:21AM (#10094742) Homepage
      The driver and transducer should have been selected so that there was no possibility of dangerous sound levels, no matter what the software decided to do.

    • Re:Maximum volume (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Flexagon ( 740643 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:27AM (#10094762)

      Didn't even old 500 phones have a current limiter across the earpiece to prevent just this sort of thing? (I.e., a phone ring voltage somehow arriving while the handset is at your ear.) This isn't a new problem.

      • Re:Maximum volume (Score:3, Informative)

        by Animats ( 122034 )
        Wireline ring voltage is 88V 20Hz, so all you get is a loud bass buzz.
      • The WE 500 series (and pretty much every Western Electric phone introduced after 1949) has a varistor across the receiver element to prevent loud clicks and pops from hurting the user's ear. The older phones don't have this; holding a 302 up to your ear while playing with the telephone line can be a painful experience :)
    • The maximum volume is quite high as it you can also use it as a speaker phone.
    • What is the maximum volume on this phone?


      Probably pretty high. Several phones that include polyphonic ringing tones use the speaker to play the ringing sound. I've experienced something similar on my GFs Samsung phone, when it went dead during a call. Exremely loud sound playing, right smack into your ear.

  • Funniest thing (Score:3, Informative)

    by cablepokerface ( 718716 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:16AM (#10094724)
    My gf bought one of these things a couple of days ago, when this statement was released the Dutch news networks thought it was important enough to put in the news on the radio. So I heard it driving home from work.

    The first thing I did when I got home was telling the misses that that tune she always hears when the phone is actually ringing on the other side (when every phone user already has the thing to his ear) was not here to stay.

    I am not sure if this is how it's done with every Siemens but with her it was menu option 3.8.3 (or Sound Options -> Other Tunes -> Connection Tune (on/off). Get rid of it.
    • this doesn't refer to the connection tune though.

      this refers(as the blurb says) to the phone shutting itself down while you're making a call, and during that process of shutting down it plays a tune at pretty high volume(while you're holding it next to your ear).

      it's probably adjustable in siemens phones sold nowadays, i had some older model for a while and couldn't find where the hell to turn off the 'low batt' warning sound.. was very annoying and made it impossible to have it on silent anywhere where y

  • Misread (Score:5, Funny)

    by xsupergr0verx ( 758121 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:16AM (#10094725)
    I thought it said "Did Your Code Ever Make Anyone Dead?"

    That time will come, but first the killer robots need some touching up around the joints...
    • How about those Navy ships with windows installed... and one of them froze up and was stuck at sea helpless a while back. Fortunatly not in any danger at the time.

      The time is now. It's just that your killer robots won't be bipedal. We've already got folks who can do that trick.

  • Mobile Phone Usage (Score:5, Funny)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:16AM (#10094726) Homepage
    However, this danger can only arise if the mobile phone is held up directly to the ear while the melody is playing.

    Gee whiz, what are the chances of a user holding a mobile phone next to their ear? I always keep mine strapped to my elbow.

  • Let that be a lesson (Score:5, Funny)

    by Insurgent2 ( 615836 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:18AM (#10094732)
    That's what happens when you outsource the hardware to Singapore and the software to India.
    "Soft beep" in Mandarin probably translates to "Loud, deafening tone" in Hindi.

  • How many dbs? Frequency? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Shant3030 ( 414048 ) * on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:19AM (#10094736)
    Anyone know the db and frequency of any of the ring tones?

    Could not find the info. Purposelly withheld from the articles?
    • I'd imagine it depends on the ring tone. And since 3rd party ring tones are pretty popular in Europe, there's probably not much point in specifying particular ring tones. You'll just confuse the customer.
    • I can't say for sure if it was one the models in question but a few weeks ago, I was eating dinner at a Mexican restraunt and some lady had her phone start making a really loud high-pitched constant tone. A rough guess is that it was in the 4-8KHz range and loud enough that it was unpleasant from 20-30 ft away.

      The worst part is that she wasn't smart enough to remove the battery from the device, so this went on for a good 5 minutes.

  • My professor... (Score:4, Funny)

    by A1miras ( 595087 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:25AM (#10094754) Homepage
    Often upon seeing my solutions to the labs in my first programming class, the Professor would let out a shriek that caused hearing damage to virtually everyone within a 3 mile radius and killed several Koi fish in a nearby pond.
  • I had a Samsung SCH-8500, SprintPCS. Sure it made sounds when the battery died, but it was usually a quiet beep. However, at times (and for causes unknown to me) it would beep really really loudly in my ear. Me being the idiot that I was, I never got it replaced. Probably should have. It may have been a heat problem (talking too long), but I'm not sure. It was loud enough to be painful.

    Anyway, I now have a Sanyo PM-8200 and I'm quite happy.

  • Try an exploding phone for size... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Numen ( 244707 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:29AM (#10094770)
    If you think that's funny try "mobile phone exploding" on Google =)

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8& q= mobile+phone+exploding

  • What the..? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Azureflare ( 645778 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:29AM (#10094771)
    Does the hardware for these phones not have a built in filter to protect the user from this type of thing?

    Isn't there hardware in these devices that prevents very loud noises/extremely high pitched noise? I mean, how hard is it to put a volume hardware filter on these devices. There's no reason to have something as loud or as high pitched as was being described, is there?

    As a side note, what if an mp3 is corrupted on my mp3 player and the corrupted data causes an extremely high-pitched tone to be emitted for a long duration...? Do mp3 players have hardware (like a volume filter, or a high pass filter) that would prevent me from going deaf?

    • Yeah. It's called taking the headphones off.

      In all seriousness, mp3 players have no need to play sound that loudly unless you turn the volume really high manually (in which case it's your own fault). Cellphones aren't the same way, because they also need to ring. It's not quite comparable.

  • Only after three tries (Score:5, Informative)

    by RollingThunder ( 88952 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:30AM (#10094772)
    The story on El Reg has a bit of helpful information (emphasis mine):

    The flaw affects version 11 of the software of the C65, CX65, M65, S65 model phones, and then only if the phone has already issued three low-battery warnings.

    With the "only after three" it sounds like this was meant a 'feature' where they assumed that if you didn't do something after the first three beeps, it must be in your pocket or somewhere else you can't hear it - so crank up the volume.

    Obviously, they forgot that people won't immediately end their calls - rather, they'll stay on the call, because their phone is about to die, and they want to get as much info across before it kicks the bucket.
    • I have no idea if this phone was designed in Germany or in some outsourcing place in the middle of Kuala Lumpur, but it says, to my mind, a lot about the pressure the engineers and designers are under, in order to keep costs low and deadlines held. So much so that, in order for the phone to make it to market in time, some marketing fuckhead decided to skip the QA altogether.

      I bet he's looking for a new job now.

  • An idea (Score:4, Funny)

    by Teahouse ( 267087 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:42AM (#10094813)
    Here's a horrible idea I know some l33t3r is probably working on right now. How about a worm that makes the screen strobe-flash red? I wonder how many poor kids some idiot programmer is going to put into convlusions to prove they have skills. Infect 1 million computers with this, and you can expect at least 100 seizures. You know someone is working on it.

  • You've got it all wrong (Score:3, Funny)

    by lildogie ( 54998 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:44AM (#10094820)
    Just after the shriek, look for a bystander that hates cell phones, holding a gadget in his hand, and smiling.

  • No, but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by precogpunk ( 448371 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @02:49AM (#10094841) Journal
    I had a user complain that my website gave them a hairy palm.
  • My old Samsung SCH-3500 had a similar problem but the folks at SprintPCS could never locate the problem nor would they offer a replacement.

    One of the most serious software problems involved the Therac 25 [monash.edu.au] computerized radiation therapy device. Several patients received exterme overdoses of X-rays due to a programming bug. It's a well-known case covered in some computer ethics classes. Unfortunately, most software is exempt from product liability claims.

  • No, but... (Score:2, Funny)

    by errxn ( 108621 )
    ...I got a Blue Screen of Deaf once. Does that count?

    <ducks>
  • It's been a while so my memory is a bit fuzzy so I'm paraphrasing:
    Back in High School, programming on Borland Turbo Pascal (6.0?), I noticed the following gem in the help file description of the sound generation function. In addition to the ususal function parameters, etc, there was an odd little anecdote about how the resonant frequency of a chicken head is about 3 Hertz and how one time a factory that generated this frequency at high volume ended killing all of the chickens in a neighboring chicken farm.

  • No but (Score:2)

    by ewe2 ( 47163 )
    plenty of people have screamed :)
  • Anybody remember those cell phones by Sony that had the thumbwheel and a flip out microphone stalk? That was back before Sony got of actually making their own cellphones like 5+ years ago.

    SprintPCS provided those Sonys. But, they had a problem (or at least the ones that my wife and I owned did) - sometimes the software would crash, perhaps related to a drop in signal level, hard to say because it was fairly rare. But when they crashed, they crashed LOUD.

    The speaker, which you've got right up against yo
    • This brought a smile to my face. Just thinking of chucking a cellphone like a grenade does that. I don't know why...
    • you'd be talking along and then all of a sudden your ear would be sore and you had just thrown the phone across the room and you weren't quite sure why.
      That happens sometimes when I'm talking to certain clients on the phone. Funny thing is; I never hear any loud sounds from the phone when it happens.
    • he cheap shit you get today will break if you just drop it on a cement floor, never mind chucking it like it was a live grenade

      Mine doesn't - Ericsson T100. Looks like it's made of polycarbonate.

  • Not quite the same... (Score:3, Funny)

    by SmittyTheBold ( 14066 ) <[deth_bunny] [at] [yahoo.com]> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:07AM (#10095033) Homepage Journal
    ...but I had a Motorola V120X that showed numerous interesting behaviors, especially when it came to ringing.

    My (least) favorite was when I'd answer the phone, and the conversation would be connected, but the phone would continue ringing until the phone call ended. You can bet I made sure those calls were very short.

    I hated that phone.

  • I've got a new M65... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zarathustra.fi ( 513464 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:21AM (#10095048)
    And it's software is a piece of crap, full of bugs! I know there're software updates out there, but conveniently Siemens didn't supply the phone with a data cable. But hey, I could buy it for 30 euros! Brilliant, I can buy myself a right to patch the phone!! Or, as it turned out, I could find the single provider in my home town who's able to patch the phone. Though, I'm not sure if it's cost free even there..

    Enough of personal whine, here're some of the most annoying bugs and misfeatures:

    - The sounds are really loud, even in their lowest setting.
    - Software crashes if I try to read SMS messages through a shortcut interface. Instead, I must go carefully through few extra menus not to crash the system.
    - GUI jams if I cancel a call just after I dialed it in
    - The battery dies in just a few days' casual use
    - Sometimes during battery charging the screen backlight hangs on, so when you pick up your phone, the backlight has used all the power in the battery and it's all out again.

    So, these are the "few" little bugs I'm experiencing. My previous phone was not totally bug free itself, but those few little hickups were nothing considered to these MAJOR bugs Siemens let in the wild with a crappy software on a good looking phone!

  • The laws of acoustics and hearing damage (Score:4, Informative)

    by incog8723 ( 579923 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @04:45AM (#10095091)
    I submitted a comment accidentally without the proper references, but basically, OSHA says that

    Sound level:
    Maximum allowable duration per day
    100 dB: 2 hours
    102 dB: 1½ hour
    105 dB: 1 hour
    110 dB: ½ hour
    115 dB: ¼ hour or less

    Reference: http://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_docum ent?p_table=STANDARDS&p_id=9735

    So, unless your cellphone is expressing 115db ringtones, for over 15 minutes, and you're STILL listening to it, you have nothing to worry about. DUH!!!!!! This is a case of hot coffee from McDonalds. If you're having a painful noise injected into your ear, you remove yourself from the source. Hot coffee is even MORE of a reason to sue than this. WAKE UP PEOPLE.
    • I imagine that those values apply to the "typical" person with average hearing.

      Somebody who already had sensitive hearing, such as by listening to loud music or playing in a band, might find that the tolerances are a lot lower. These people would not necessarily assume that a mobile phone was going to emit a noise that was over their pain threshold.

      K

    • Recall that the decibel is a (logarithmic) measure of sound intensity, and that is subject to the inverse square law. If one halves the distance between the source and the observer, the intensity is doubled. The decibel measurement is not doubled, since the scale is logarithmic, but it is still clear that, as the source comes closer to the observer, the decibel measurement becomes very large. Also, as another poster noted, the ear is more sensitive to some frequencies than others; therefore, a table like

    • Re:The laws of acoustics and hearing damage (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @10:43AM (#10095937) Journal
      So, unless your cellphone is expressing 115db ringtones, for over 15 minutes, and you're STILL listening to it, you have nothing to worry about. DUH!!!!!!

      A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Some rough guesstimates--I'm in a bit of a hurry this morning, and someone is welcome to do a sanity check.

      Say the phone rings at perceived 85 dB when it's on your belt or in your pocket. That's loud enough to be heard over most traffic downtown, though you would likely miss it if a truck was going by. Figure the phone is one meter (a little over three feet) away from your eardrum.

      When the phone is at your ear, the speaker is maybe three centimeters (about an inch) from your eardrum. That's a reduction in distance by a factor of around thirty or so. Since sound intensity follows an inverse square relation, you're looking at about a thousand times as much intensity. The decibel scale is logarithmic, so that's an extra 30 dB right there, putting us at 115 dB.

      If the phone is a little louder than that initial estimate, or held slightly closer to the ear, we're moving towards 120 dB and up. Even if it's not doing permanent harm, those sounds are loud enough to be physically painful at short durations, especially if the person is listening intently and not expecting to be blasted. The startle response that's prompted could also be harmful.

      • Worse; the sound is dissapating into the environment at your belt buckle, but will be directed into your ear if you have it at your ear when it goes off. You can probably tack on another 3-10 dB for that, depending on the phone's construction. (Wide range there because I don't know the numbers, just the effect; for that matter it may come out over 10, I'm just not confident about it.)

        The inverse square law is for a perfectly spherical emitter in an obstacle-free environment (a sea of air), in reality it ca

  • Ericsson And Sony-Ericss phones have similar flaws (Score:4, Informative)

    by djace ( 641019 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @05:01AM (#10095122) Homepage
    I've owned an Ericsson phone, and it had a similar flaw. After hitting the Automatically Redial option when a number is busy, when the phone is able to go thru, it plays a LOUD tone. And, this is done even when the phone is on "Silent" mode. Newer Sony-Ericsson models only do this when the "Silent" mode is off. Even though, nowhere in the manual does it say that you should NOT hold the phone next to your ear when using the Automatically Redial option.

  • Possible explanation here (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Archimonde ( 668883 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @05:40AM (#10095192)
    Older siemens mobile phones had two speakers. One was normal speaker and the other was just for ringing. When batteries reached minimum the ringing speaker sounded with ear piercing beeps but fortunately the speaker was placed on the side of the phone.

    Todays phones have one speaker for both communication and ringing. So siemens probably sticked to their software design and implemented it in the modern phones. The result is obviously not so satisfying considering those high pitched tones resonating in your ear.
  • and till date(thank god )i havent had any software problem.Over 2 and half years and no crashes due to buggy software.i must have dropped it about a 100 times and despite a cracked screen it still works.

    Sometimes,old is really gold.

  • Example of bad sound code... (Score:4, Informative)

    by feidaykin ( 158035 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:18AM (#10095349) Journal
    I was using a friend's computer... this friend just happened to have the fancy Klipsch THX certified speakers, which cost a pretty penny... Anyway, we got to talking about old DOS games and this one called "Acid Tetris" came to mind, and for nostalgia purposes, we decided to download it. My friend was a little concerned something "bad" would happen running such an old DOS game in XP, but I was confident since I've run games like Dune II without any major issues, and besides, the worst that can happen is it just won't work... right?

    So, so very wrong. The instant it opened an eardrum-shattering scream let loose through the mighty, three figure dollar amount speakers. I instantly closed out the game only to find that a persistent buzzing sound was present. At this point I think my friend stopped breathing (fearing the speakers were totally ruined) and I thought, hey no big deal, I'll just reboot. Buzz sound was still there. Well no big deal, let's just power down and unplug everything. Buzz sound still there. I didn't think it was that bad, but this nameless friend of mine couldn't stand it and bought new speakers.

    And I now have a pair of Klipsch speakers that make a rather obnoxious buzzing noise. But they were free! So, in a sense, this bad sound code that almost ruined these speakers (they're worthless in dollar terms, no way I could sell them on eBay, etc) also provided me with free speakers that I never would have bought with my own funds.

    I must therefore both curse and thank the developers of Acid Tetris, and more likely the folks in charge of backwards compatibility at Microsoft, and my own stupid self for running an old program and trusting XP to not bork itself.

    If you've read this whole thing you're a brave, yet sad soul... but stay tuned for further adventures in computing with your hero(or nemesis?), the one and only Michael "Mad" Raymer!

    • Re:Example of bad sound code... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zone-MR ( 631588 ) * <slashdot AT zone-mr DOT net> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:55AM (#10095412) Homepage
      It sounds like your friend hadn't set the volume levels correctly.

      Most likely, the speakers were set to a very high volume, and this was compensated for by setting the volume level on Windows XP very low. The old DOS game ignored the WinXP volume level, and produced the maximum output the sound card was capable of.

      If the speakers were set to produce a loud but non-destructive level of sound at the soundcards maximum output, this would never have happened. However badly the game was designed, it could not have made the soundcard produce an output higher than 5V pk-pk
    • That was the bad thing with many MS-DOS games and early PC's, there was no audio control, as all sound was created by sending frequency as an 8-bit value to port 61h. If you were lucky, some games allowed you to switch the sound off. In order for me to play games at night or to play games with terrible audio, I had to lobotomize each game by doing an automatic disassembly and replacing E6 61 with 90 90.

      This replaced the instruction:

      out 61h,al

      with the instructions:

      nop
      nop
      Peace and quiet :)

  • It isn't like you don't have TWO ears (Score:3, Funny)

    by The Other White Meat ( 59114 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:20AM (#10095355)
    Frankly, I do not see what the problem is.

    As the owner of a Siemens Series 65 phone, you have the responsibility to care for it. If you didn't feed your child, it would cry loudly, would it not?

    That the Siemens Series 65 phone emits an ear bleeding shreak when starved for energy (and obviously attention as well) is just survival of the fittest. Other phones may be regularly left to starve until shutdown, but with the Siemens, that is likely to never happen a second time.

    I for one welcome our ear destroying, power requiring, attention demanding Cellular Overlord®.

  • Olden Code (Score:3, Funny)

    by MykeBNY ( 303290 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @08:08AM (#10095440)
    I'm surprised some of the code from olden days hasn't made anyone deaf yet, with all that shouting..

    10 REM HELLO WORLD
    20 CLS
    30 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!" .. okay, bad joke..

  • Safety engineering can crop up anywhere (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @11:06AM (#10096060) Journal
    You'd expect your code to be safety-critical on a jetliner or a radiation therapy machine, but would it occur to you to worry about danger to humans in a cell phone UI?

    This makes at least two places that cell phone embedded software has safety implications. The other is charge control on lithium batteries: a lithium fire in your pocket is enough to ruin your whole day.

  • No, but it can kill chickens (Score:4, Funny)

    by ChopsMIDI ( 613634 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @01:29PM (#10096953) Homepage
    From the borland Turbo C++ 3.0 help file for the function "sound()".

    /* True story: 7 Hz is the resonant
    frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
    This was determined empirically in
    Australia, where a new factory
    generating 7-Hz tones was located too
    close to a chicken ranch: When the
    factory started up, all the chickens
    died.

    Your PC may not be able to emit a 7-Hz tone. */

    #include <dos.h>

    int main(void)
    {
    sound(7);
    delay(10000);
    nosound();
    return 0;
    }

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