At the risk of over-simplification, I would propose that a phone has one ‘prime directive’ in terms of functionality, namely to…

…Allow The Making And Receiving Of Phone Calls.

If a phone cannot manage this, then it no longer qualifies as a phone, in my book.

Based on that reasoning, I would now propose that my piece-of-shit LG Viewty is only about 50% phone*. Not only is it spectacularly poor at making and receiving phone calls, it manages to parade its mediocrity in this regard via this particularly vexing ‘error’ message:

The thing that irks me the most about this message is that the phone seems to use it as a one-size-fits-all solution to inform the user that “there is no call going on right now”. I see this message in a variety of situations:

1. When a call has ended normally

This is the sole ‘acceptable use’ of the “Call ended” message. In this circumstance, it means that one of the participants of the call has chosen to end it. Fair enough.

2. When the phone is too shit to place the call successfully

I get this with about 50% of all outgoing calls I try to make. The phone does a load of fuck-all while it fails to place the call, then flashes up the “Call ended” message before returning to its home screen (the Viewty equivalent of sauntering away, whistling nonchalantly).

This annoys me because: (a) the call did not fucking “end” – it never began in the first place, dipshit; (b) the phone should be more successful at making the call in the first place – it’s got a nice strong signal and every other phone works fine on the same network; (c) it should give some audible hint of its abject failure to place the call, rather than just remaining silent and waiting for me to remove the thing from my ear every few seconds to check whether it’s fucked up yet.

3. When the phone just gets bored and randomly hangs up in the middle of a call for no discernible reason

From time to time (and, hilariously, all the time during one week a couple of months ago), the phone will just drop an ongoing call. OK, so this can happen with mobile phones. Of course, my phone does it much more than all other phones, regardless of signal strength and such, but hey.

But, unlike any other phone that I have ever owned, it doesn’t bother telling me that the call has ended unexpectedly. Oh no. It just ends the call silently, and saunters away with me still jabbering away into a silent, inoperative phone clamped to my ear. It just sounds like the person on the other end has gone quiet – there is no audible indication that the call has ended.

I find this to be particularly good fun when leaving a message on someone’s voicemail, as I can rabbit away through the entire message, and only find out that the phone had decided to drop the call at some undisclosed point in history once I have finished. This leaves me with a tricky conundrum – do I assume that I managed to get most of my message across, or do I leave another voicemail with the same message just to be safe? This is a catch-22 situation. If I assume that the message got through fine, I will invariably be wrong, and will at some point be disrespected for leaving a voicemail composed solely of “Hi, it’s Dave”. However if I elect to leave the message again, I get to look like a dribbling retard/stalker for leaving the same message twice (or, more usually, three or four times when the fucking phone pulls the same trick again).

I hate it so much.