So you got yourself a fancy new G1 cellphone.  It’s so fancy!  It’s so intuitive!

It’s so fancy and intuitive in fact that it even thinks for you.

Like, say, if you were texting someone, and you were telling them how you had to reboot your computer at work, like magic, the fancy G1 would reboot itself upon seeing the word.  It’s that intuitive.

Yes, you read that right.  The G1 handset has a bug that it picks up on keywords you enter, say in texting someone, and operates itself according to those keywords.  So if you text the word reboot to someone, your G1 reboots itself.

Neat!

No, not really.

Even worse, if you had texted that to a server running Google’s Android like your G1 phone does, then that server would have rebooted too.  Or if someone knowing your phone’s flaws was just evil and vindictive, they could keep texting you the word reboot over, and over, and over, and over…

Fortunately Google has issued a fix.  Well, a partial fix it seems.  I guess Android isn’t built in a day.  Or fixed in one either.

Still, how in the world did this bug ever get past testing?  And who even thought this was a useful feature anyway?