Losing your cell phone sucks. You rummage around the couch cushions and try to squeeze your head under the car seat, all while wondering if the waiter at your favorite restaurant just scored a new handset – and perhaps a few hundred dollars’ worth of calls. Help is on the way. Of course, the US is a cell tech backwater, but firms in other countries are working on innovative antitheft products for mobiles. Some act as deterrents, others help recover the phone, and a few just satisfy your primal urge for revenge. Now, if we could just get these things stateside.
4 Antitheft Technologies
• Screamer The Remote XT harasses UK cell-swipers with a loud, high-pitched human scream (the service puts a recording of a woman shrieking on your phone). The system activates when the owner calls a hotline. The nerve-jarring wails accompany a complete data wipe and button lockdown, creating one useless piece of plastic.
• Gait and Voice Recognition Researchers at Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre are developing a sensor system that enables a phone to recognize its owner’s unique style of walking. The plan is to combine this gait monitor with voice recognition software, so if your gadget senses a different stride or vocal pitch, it locks up and requests a password.
• Holster Sensor Canada’s Research in Motion (of BlackBerry fame) is working on a phone that pairs wirelessly with its holster. If the two get separated, the phone locks up and asks for a password, and an alert goes off on the holster, notifying the owner immediately – provided, of course, the thief didn’t steal the holster, too.
• GPS Tracker Japanese mega telecom NTT DoCoMo introduced six handsets equipped with a GPS tracking service in October. If one of these phones goes missing, you can just log onto a Web site and locate it on a map. Then all you have to do is confront the pickpocket or get the police to give a damn about a stolen phone.
