Owners must keep phones on a leash
BY PENNY HAW, 30 JANUARY 2013, 05:37
Several months ago, my sister-in-law, who lives near Durban, was awoken in the wee hours of the morning by a call from the cellphone belonging to her daughter, who was away at university in Grahamstown. The voice behind the call, however, was that of a strange man.
“Hello? Mum?” he asked. “I was out for a run and found this BlackBerry lying in a gutter. I guess it’s your child’s?”
The story has a happy ending. My niece had dropped the device on her way back to her digs. Phone and student were reunited by the actions of a considerate runner.
But not all lost cellphones are recovered. In fact, forget the age-old mystery of the eternal whereabouts of the single sock, a study conducted by mobile security company Lookout says globally, R63m worth of handsets are lost — every day. And the number increases on special occasions, peaking on New Year’s Eve, when partying people are apparently at their most distracted/irresponsible.
Although the study found that most devices are misplaced in coffee shops, restaurants, pharmacies, church and petrol stations, an insurance company in the UK recently released a list of “far-fetched claims” for lost cellphones.
It includes claims for phones flushed down loos (this one I know first-hand), baked into cakes, snatched by seagulls and dropped into fireworks.
My favourite claim, though, is the one lodged by a farmer, who was using the flashlight app on his iPhone while delivering a calf and dropped the handset into the cow.
Weird claims aside, most phones disappear (to where?) because people leave them behind, which is what makes the Cirago iAlert Tag and Cobra Tag for smartphones such useful technology. The tags are small, lightweight gadgets that look something like those used to unlock cars and fit conveniently onto your key ring. They “talk” to your phone via energy-efficient Bluetooth 4.0. If you move more than 9m away from your handset, the tags emit a high, insistent beep that compels you to go back and fetch it. If you prefer, you can select a song to replace the beep — If You Leave Me Now by Chicago seems appropriate
What’s even more useful is that the tags are two-way finders: if you take your phone but leave your keys behind, the handset alerts you with a beep or song.
And if your phone is lost somewhere in your home or office, you can press a button on the tag to make the handset sound the alarm (provided you’re within that 9m of it). What’s more, to secure the data on the phone, you can set the application to lock it when you’re out of range.
The Cobra has yet another feature: if your keys and phone are separated and you don’t notice, the phone sends an e-mail (to multiple addresses chosen by you), which records the last known time it was near the tag, along with GPS co-ordinates.
Of course, if your phone is in the sewer, at the bottom of the ocean (courtesy of a seagull) or in one of the four stomachs of a cow, even that won’t help.
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