Wifes cell phone was stolen from El Rodeo by an EMPLOYEE!

[Benny]

It depends on the cell phone. Mine runs a variant of Linux, so I can remotely access it over the internet and tell it to e-mail its GPS coordinates to me. I can even wipe it completely if I feel so inclined.

How does one go about figuring out if his phone has this?

I have a Blackberry Bold that has all kinds of crap on it I've never used.

 

[JetGirl]

Maybe the waitress thought you were delivering her Obama cell phone?

Well played.

 

[Phil502]

Maybe the waitress thought you were delivering her Obama cell phone?

It was under the re-distribution of phones program.

 

[Scutter01]

How does one go about figuring out if his phone has this?

I have a Blackberry Bold that has all kinds of crap on it I've never used.

Mine is in the category of "hackable phones" and so I've hacked my phone. A lot.

If your phone has a GPS on it, it probably has some way to report that back to you. Sprint, for example, officially offers it as a service for $5/month, but it occasionally notifies (via SMS) the phone that it's being monitored so you can't really do it in secret.

 

[Benny]

Mine is in the category of "hackable phones" and so I've hacked my phone. A lot.

If your phone has a GPS on it, it probably has some way to report that back to you. Sprint, for example, officially offers it as a service for $5/month, but it occasionally notifies (via SMS) the phone that it's being monitored so you can't really do it in secret.

OK thanks.

Yeah, my phone has an option for GPS, but since I have a free one built into my car stereo, paying an extra $5.00 a month for one on my phone would seem a bit silly.

 

[Scutter01]

OK thanks.

Yeah, my phone has an option for GPS, but since I have a free one built into my car stereo, paying an extra $5.00 a month for one on my phone would seem a bit silly.

Yeah, it's nice that mine runs Linux. It's a pretty open phone and the APIs for having it report GPS location data is part of the software development kit that the manufacturer gives out.

The service that Sprint sells is called Family Locator and it's designed to be able to track your kids' locations. I have no interest in that. But it's nice to be able to e-mail my phone in case it gets stolen and have it tell me where it is.

 

[CountryBoy19]

Since the thread slightly side-tracked, I'll add in about the tracking. My friend has an I-phone that he forgot on a table at his college campus. He went back only minutes later and there were some other people sitting where he was, and they said they hadn't seen the phone. So he got out his computer and tracked it, right to the area, so he knew it was still in the area. He mentioned to his friend that was with him that he can send it a signal to play a very loud locator tone. And as he was just about to do that, one of the kids fessed up and pulled it out of his back-pack.

This is a great feature, I'm not sure if the ops phone has it, but maybe that would've been the best course of action to do immediately after it was stolen.