The mystery of the haunted phone

About nine months ago I upgraded my phone to the then-quite-fancy (if not totally new) Sony Ericsson k850i Cybershot. A nice chunky phone (although with a touch of "Grrr Manly" about it) incorporating a very nice 5 megapixel camera, it also boasted a partly touch-activated screen. It's been a handbag essential ever since - until this weekend, when it started to get a bit... funny.

It started on Saturday morning when I turned the phone on to find the screen flashing urgently. Apparently a ghost was pressing all the buttons on the touch screen at the same time; hmm, I thought, how curious. I cancelled the various text messages it was trying to send and deleted them, but no matter how often I did it, they kept reappearing. Curiouser!

Finally I managed to lock it (despite its best efforts to foil me) and watched it suspiciously for a while. Nothing changed so I stuck it back in my bag, only to retrieve it some hours later to find that it had autosaved 18 blank draft text messages to my lucky friend Al and had twice tried to call my sister in Latvia.

Even as I watched, it beeped with an incoming message - which I found myself entirely unable to access because the Invisible Presence was pressing buttons faster than I was. If I got even so far as the inbox screen for text messages it would start trying to delete things or asking me whether I really wanted to forward this message to everyone in my address book. And don't even get me started on trying to send a text; it's frankly impossible unless I want my contacts to receive a string of garbled half words from messages sent randomly partway through writing.

On the bright side, I can still make calls - barely - as long as I do it fast enough to prevent the poltergeist calling someone else while I'm flicking through my contact list.

I wonder if the o2 store staff can exorcise demons.