Why does dialing *100# (to check prepaid account balance) work from dialer but not from contacts?
Hello,
to check my prepaid account balance, I can dial *100# and my carrier sends me back a message with the balance information. I used to save this number under my contacts in my "feature phone" and it worked great. With the ZTE Open from Movistar (Spain), dialing the number from the dialer works, I get the requested message. However, when I save this number under my contacts and I dial it from there, I don't get the requested message. From the dialer, it doesn't really dial but sends information to the carrier which sends information back. From within the contacts, it seems to be treated as a phone number which is not recognized, and I get some sort of busy tone back. Can this be settled in some way? This would be very convenient! I guess this is true for the complete target group of FFOS.
Cheers
All Replies (7)
Going through contacts would probably take just as long as Dialing, But in this case i think it is to do with your Service Provider not the phone itself. Remember Mozilla only make the OS it is probably your Provider that is making it do that.
Why wouldn't my provider want me to dial the code through contacts? I rather think this is a bug. Could anyone with a Geeksphone check?
I have to agree that dialing through contacts takes as long as through the dialer. However, as different providers have different codes, and as I don't use this service on a daily basis, I tend to forget which code to dial. That's why saving the code to contacts makes sense to me. It worked with my feature phone and I know it works with Android. It isn't a show stopper, but If there is an easy fix, I would recommend to correct this. Especially knowing that FFOS is often going to be used with prepaid cards.
If anyone is interested, here are some screenshots illustrating the different behaviors. Note that when dialing from the dialer, the name of the 'contact' is also shown, as I saved it in contacts.
Modified by gb2g
I ran into this as well, when I tried to use contact entries for enabling/disabling redirection. It seems to me that the transfer of the entry between contacts and phone is somehow missing characters, because, when I start putting in the code in the phone app, the display of the match from the contacts is not shown after the first special character (such as * or #), but only after typing in additional characters. Not sure though, if this is a correct interpretation of this behaviour. The strange thing is that once the contact entry is displayed in the phone app, I can tap on it and it works fine, even though dialling directly from the contacts app fails. In any case, to document this I opened a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=933868
Modified by WerWer
I dont think it's the provider, but rather a bug in the OS. On my phone the saved contact for *100# is shown when I use the dial. So the * is read as *, I guess, but for some strange reason not "dialed" as *. I hope the crew is able to fix this strange behaviour!
On my device, the name of the contact 'Check account balance' is shown in the dialer after the first three characters are entered, that is *10
I also tried to tap on it then, which worked as intended.
As soon as I find time to create an account on bugzilla, I will "+1" Werwer's bug report.
Modified by gb2g
Actually, I just commented on that bug with a brand new account on bugzilla. And I also found a possible explanation for the behavior: from the contact app, a comma (pause?) seems to be dialed upfront, which might break the code. What do you think?
See screenshots above for the preceding comma.
Thank you for adding your information to the bug.
Once again, there seems to be a difference between the phone/software combination:
When I see the contact data displayed after entering a few digits in the phone app, I see something like "Mobil | #21#", where "Mobil" is the type of number in the contact (I did not change the default).
However, in the call log, the numbers dialled from the contacts app appear for example as "Mobil, #21#".
So far, I've never considered the comma as a dial component. It always seemed to me the separator between the type of number and the number. I really don't know, how this comma is to be interpreted.
Another thing I noticed is that the code, if dialled successfully from the phone app, is NOT added to the call log. If it is dialled unsuccessfully from the contacts app, it is shown in the call log. So maybe the phone app treats the code in a special way, not like a regular phone number, i.e. something the contacts app does not know about?
But this is really just guessing on my part.