Lose your phone and the response is usually not that good. It will be a mixture of panic, sadness and self-recrimination at your own carelessness. This will be followed closely by a sense of regret that you had so much confidence in your own ability not to lose things that you didn’t install a tracking app. What makes it worse is the sinking feeling that you get when you realize how much it will cost to buy a new device and all the contacts that you might have lost.
But not anymore! Plan B allows users to find their devices after they’ve lost them, even if they don’t have the kind of cautious minds that inspire people to install a tracking app before they misplace their phones.
Once you realize the phone is lost, you can remotely download Plan B to the phone from the Android Market. Once downloaded, the app will start automatically, locating the phone using cell towers and GPS data. On some devices, it might even switch on GPS automatically. The location will be updated five times every ten minutes and send a message containing the phone’s location each time to your Gmail account. The process can be started again by texting “locate” to your number from another phone ensuring that you can still find the device even if it’s sitting in someone else’s pocket.
The email is only sent to the Gmail address already associated with your Android phone but the location software is accurate within meters, good enough to know whether you left the phone in a restaurant, at a friend’s house or on the bus. The email you receive will even contain a map, making the retrieval as simple as possible.
Plan B is free and is provided by Lookout Labs, developers of security software whose premium services include a privacy advisor and safe browsing option. Plan B though is valuable enough in its own right. By enabling users to find their phones after they’ve been lost even though they failed to download a tracking app earlier, the company has filled a real user need — and removed the need to download tracking apps in the first place.
It has however also removed one benefit. Until now, the loss of a phone was a good excuse to upgrade your device to a newer model. Now users who were thinking of trading up when their carelessness kicked in will need a very different kind of Plan B! =)
Download Plan B at the Android Market!
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.lookout.labs.planb&hl=en
