I am a new (but 'older') iPhone 5 owner and completely hooked on its functionality, design and overall presentation.

However I am irritated by the Voice Control (VC) feature, in particular its ability to entirely circumvent the Passcode, its ability to be turned off entirely and its very poor speech recognition capability.

Here's my experience and results; I have owned many ipods over the years with the main purpose being to listen to music and podcasts in bed, using the timer function to stop the playback, usually after I am well asleep. In this regard I use the iPhone in a similar manner, setting it up on Timer then activating the Passlock and plugging in my buds.

Recently a friend texted me to say that I had called her at 3:41am - "was I OK and what was the call about?" I consulted the user manual (not too savvy in the early days of ownership) re obtaining call logs and she was right - there was a call entry to her there at 3:41am, and more concerning, there were at least 5x calls to places all over the world, none of which were known to me or my Contacts.

Now I read elsewhere that these calls are most likely to have been placed by VC outside the Passlock
although there is no way I could construct these numbers and speak them in my dreams (or nightmares!). This is presumably caused by my moving during sleep and the button getting 'leaned' on inadvertently for several seconds causing VC to kick in.

Now I have the Dial Out feature in VC disabled, however now I get the dulcet tones of the announcer telling me that the Dial Out feature has been disabled.

I conducted some rudimentary tests with VC and Dial Out enabled - it seems that white noise (hissing into the mic or rubbing the phone over the bedclothes) will easily provoke VC into dialing a Contact or constructing some random number and dialing it up (hence the overseas dial up entries). Also whistling the first 6x notes of the Star Spangled Banner (or any other tune) will get it going too.

On can only imagine the uproar if the phone dialed out to someone during more hectic bedroom activity!

This is a serious security breach of my iPhone - anyone could pick up my Passlocked phone, start up VC and provoke it into dialing one of my contacts, then as a joke or maliciously, sounding off a string of abuse or threats in my name. Proving to the police or others, that was not me becomes an up hill battle.

Dial Out has to remain OFF at all times which makes the whole VC experience rather pointless (not to mention its ability to sound off in my ear in the small hours of the morning). Apple's IOS engineers need to include user switches to control this feature.

I have a similar complaint with the Camera being available outside the Passlock - anyone could pick up my iPhone and take a few obscene or illegal photographs which are then added to my Camera Roll and will end up in the Cloud - worse I could be showing friends and family my latest holiday snaps on the 64" LCD TV only to be confronted with the 'other' pictures in the slideshow - nice!

Hmmmm