It’s an all too familiar scenario of your mobile phone slipping out of your pocket or purse as you scramble out of a cab. If you’re incredibly lucky you realize this quickly and start calling your phone in hopes that the next passenger is honest and will pickup and arrange to get the phone back to you. Yeah, and a Hawaii kid can become president….well anything can happen once in a while. So getting to the real point, we all cringed at this scenario because most of us live and die by our smart phones. Heck even celebs like Naomi Campbell got her purse snatched and had to explain to her buds (like Mick Jagger) that someone now had their private phone numbers.

Well the reality is that this scenario has ticked off enough people in the world that there are now lots of solutions that let you reach out and “kill your phone”. The folks at PC Mag did an amazing job of collecting data on some of the most popular smartphones, regarding options for how you can do a remote wipe. What you really want is to make sure no one abuses the data on your phone, most of us are only mildly irked about losing the actual phone. The very first version of this I ever heard about requires that your phone be setup for Microsoft Exchange (and oh by the way Windows Mobile) so that someone with administrator rights can send a special set of commands through the Exchange email push system that wipes all Exchange data on the phone. While this works well enough that syadmins use it to wipe a phone before giving it to someone else, this really only covers part of the mobile marketplace.

What I found next was you could do the exact same thing with just about any Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) since it too had a remote wipe feature. However, while both of these systems work and cover the bulk of the enterprise world, what about the rest of us? With the huge surge in Blackberry popularity, the folks at PocketMac came up with a way to do the same thing but without the blackberry enteprise server. Their solution is called the “Blackberry ER” which doesn’t even seem to require you know your phone has even been lifted. The second a thief swaps in a new SIM card, the software will automatically toss a text message at a backup mobile number with the thief’s SIM information and their GPS location. Pretty cool stuff for a software only add. Just watch the video on their site.

So anyway, let’s give PC Mag their due, after all they did a wonderful job of researching options out, so if your phone hasn’t been mentioned yet, why not check out Jamie Lendino’s article on the topic.

Tags: lost phone, New York 2009, remote kill, remote wipe, stolen phone

Comments RSS