45 seconds of play, ~5 hours of desperate hacking.
A few days ago, my 4 year old daughter was playing with my mobile phone running Android 1.6. To let her play with the screen while avoiding any mishap, I locked the phone. It was obviously not enough, she instantly found the MENU key to unlock it.
So I had the brilliant idea to put on a locking pattern, the pretty method used on Android to really lock the screen.
After 5 unsuccessful tries, which my daughter reached in about 15 seconds, the pattern unlocking incurs a 30-second guard delay. I decided that the game was too risky (I found out later there’s also a 20-try hard limit, but we didn’t reach it) and took my phone back.
There, I had another brilliantly fatal idea: I clicked on the “forgot the unlock pattern” button which just appeared, just out of curiosity to see what would happen next. The phone asked for my Gmail account and password. I filled the requested information, but it didn’t unlock the phone; apparently this is a known Android bug that I didn’t know about. And, contrary to what I naively assumed, there was no way to get back to the unlock pattern screen. I rebooted the phone. No change, no escape.
Then it dawned on me that I was 600 kilometers away from home, for almost a full week, without all my computer tools. And I was locked out of my own phone.