Help!
My android is stuck on “Emergency Call” mode.
I have a Huawei. It is a month by month pay plan.
There is enough time on this month left.
I have:
Is there anything else I can do?
Thanks,
hh
It sounds like your provider doesn’t think you have any service left. Contract them.
Might be a network error? Have you talked to the service provider?
Do you have a SIM card? Check that it’s seated properly and not damaged.
Got it!
I did a ‘Factory Reset’ and that fixed it.
Thanks, guys!
hh
For the record, in case anyone reads this in the future:
When you are in Emergency Call mode, it typically means you don’t have the rights to make calls on the network your phone sees. So either you don’t have any paid service, and thus can’t use any networks, or you have paid service, but can’t see the towers for your company.
You’re allowed to make emergency calls, however, regardless of your service status. If the phone had reception, the emergency call is allowed.
hh’s issue may have been that the phone got confused about what cell towers it could see…or which ones it wanted to see…or something like that. It’s complicated. 
Ah. I was going to guess that he told it he always told the truth, and then said “I’m lying.”
The carrier I use had its towers near my house hit by lightning last summer. Because only the competing carrier’s signal from another tower nearby was available, my phone showed its red “SOS” logo up in the corner. When I called the carrier from a different phone, they said my phone was trying to register to a tower many towns over, giving up on the very weak signal, and going back to SOS mode on the closer competitor’s tower.
In short: your carrier might have had an outage in your area and the only available signal is from other carriers until the outage is repaired.
There are also settings on my phone where I can search for nearby carriers and choose one from a list. If I choose incorrectly, and set the search mode to “Manual” instead of “Automatic” I also get the SOS indicator.
Like handsomeharry, I have an Android Huawei, and my phone would go into emergency mode several times a day. My wife took out the battery and the SIM card. She put both back in, and it has only had the emergency hiccup once since.
What is the Factory Reset?
You may have had a bad connection with the SIM card. By taking it out and putting it back in, you got a better one.
A factory reset is a command you give the phone that basically puts everything back in default modes for the device. It removes all your configuration changes and installed applications, for instance.
It’s a bit shy of re-installing the software, but it often gets the job done.,
To do one on mine, you have to turn it off, unplug battery, re-assemble, and power up, holding power key, volume up key, and the button that looks like a house until the android picture pops up, then go through to the ‘erase data-reset’, or somesuch instructions, come up. It will erase everything, but, there are other options, I think (going from memory).
It resets it to ‘like new’ settings.
This doesn’t have anything to do with SkyNet, does it…?