Find Your Smart Phone

I highly recommend Lookout Mobile Security as a tool for your Android Smart Phone.

Yesterday morning I couldn't find my cell phone, it wasn't in any of the usual places, car, dressing table, kitchen bench or side table and I thought I'd checked down the back of the couch. I tried ringing it from another phone but couldn't hear it anywhere.

So I thought I must have left it at the golf club and headed off to work. First thing I emailed our lovely club secretary and she volunteered to ring it and wander around the clubhouse to see if she could hear it.

Then it dawned on me, I'd installed an application called Lookout which is primarily a virus protection tool but also has a function that allows you to find you phone over the internet!

So I logged into my Lookout account on the internet and clicked the Find My Phone button and it presented me with a Google Map then I clicked the Locate button and a few seconds later the location of my phone was shown on the map. But it said accurate to within 2,199 meters, I thought that was weird as it's usually more accurate than 2.2 kilometres. In the past I've been able to tell which end of the house it was at and it thinks its at a house around the corner and down the street from home a kilometre or so away. Maybe one of the guys from golf had picked it up in the car park?

But it certainly wasn't at the golf club or in my office and it was close to home so I went home and tried ringing the phone again. Very, very faintly I heard it ring and there it was jammed down the side of the couch. If I hadn't been able to hear it ringing Lookout can also instruct your phone to "Scream" it plays a very high pitched tone at the highest volume your phone is capable of.

I guess that it just wasn't sending a very strong signal jammed down the couch as now it is sitting on my desk and I can see on Google Maps which corner of the office it is in.

The free version of Lookout Mobile security gives you basic virus protection, the find my phone function and a backup system.

If you upgrade to the Premium version you also get the facility to lock or wipe your phone to prevent others using it if you can't get to it.

A very cool thing to have, I'm going to install it on my keys and my wallet. And one day my daughters are going to get the fright of their life when their phone starts screaming!

Click here for a full review of the Lookout Mobile Security application by PC World

Are you wondering how Lookout does this? Almost all new smart phones (even the cheap ones) have a GPS unit in them and when you install Lookout on your phone you give it permission to turn the GPS on. Once the phone has turned GPS on it finds your position and then reports that via the cellular network to Lookout which put the coordinates into Google Maps for you and shows you the result.