Gadgetory

we're becoming more and more attached to our mobile devices our cell phones are literally a part of us that we well sometimes can do without we can't do without our email we can't do without our calendar sometimes we can't even get from point A to point B without GPS and online maps that tell us how to avoid a traffic jam but what do you do when you lose your phone or when it's stolen like happened with my wife just recently that's what we'll talk about on today's episode of the android guy weekly so i've got a samsung galaxy nexus one of the unlocked variety I've got to running on t-mobile and I've had it since well it was released I liked it so much that I got one for my wife I paid a pretty penny for it I went through expanses and I had it imported and it cost me far too much money about 750 bucks us and gave it to her as a gift and she loved it I mean this is a big phone I have big hands and I thought you know this is something that I can do but she liked it she liked using it I went ahead and upgraded her from a tmobile g2 all the way up to a Galaxy Nexus and she thought it was too big until she started using it and then she really really liked it and she got over the fact that it's a big phone right away which don't just might tell you that big phones aren't as bad as some people might make them out to be they come in really useful the one-handed operation kind of goes out the window especially if you have smaller hands that having been said this phone became her lifeline it was so much more useful and she could do so many more things quicker and more intelligently than she could with the previous version of Android on a smaller screen even though the smaller screen had a slide out keyboard was something that she got used to pretty quickly and really adopted what I'd like to call the mini slate platform you know the big smartphone well she had her contacts she had her phone of course she had her email and her Kalin the calendar is what was really important and she even started using this as her alarm clock well one Saturday morning she woke up and went to pick up some fresh fruit it kind of like a farmers market it's a local co-op basket thing where you get a whole bunch of fresh fruits and vegetables well being the supportive husband that I was I slept in under the guise of taking care of the kids yeah that's that's the story that I'm going to stick with so I was home with the kids taking care of them by sleeping and she went and picked up this wonderful fresh fruit for us throught Invisibles she came home and couldn't find her phone oh no she had lost her phone at this baskets pick up well that's okay she spent the next 20-30 minutes frantically trying to find a phone number for someone that she could call that worked for the place and let them know hey I lost my phone while i was there can you can you help did anyone turn it in unfortunately no one was available it took days before we can get ahold of someone who worked there and eventually no one had seen her phone which was a problem well in the meantime we've used google latitude which was all we had on the phone to try and locate it and it was well twenty fourth street in ogden as far as we could tell which we thought might have been the headquarters of this baskets co-op thing turns out it wasn't and it turns out it wasn't even there now why was it not there and it said it was well when cell phones are reporting locations whether that's to an application whether that's to to you looking at it on screen whether that's helped me find my lost phone app there are a couple different ways that they can report location they can either report what's called a coarse location which is essentially looking at Wi-Fi access points around them and cell phone towers around them they may be connected to and saying well I know that if you're connected to this access point or this cell tower you must be within five miles of it well five miles that's a pretty big radius and actually it was a little bit bigger than that it was very very coarse and it went from the tops of the mountains out to the middle of the lake we didn't know that because the circle on the map was so big we couldn't tell that it was that big of an area to cover it was really quite miserable but we didn't know that at the time fine location fine locations where you're using GPS the GPS chip and antenna and your phone to get it I want really precise sometimes you can get within 5 to 15 feet depending on your accuracy and where your phone is if it has a clear view of the sky and whatnot you can get really accurate pinpoint I can find out where my phone is in my house within a room or two is it in the front of the house the back of the house east or west I can find out where it is doesn't help me with floors at all so it might be on the bottom floor it might be on the top floor who knows but in this case it didn't help us that much and by the time we realized that and went to put on some other app like Plan B we were too late the battery was dead so that's what happened in chapter one so after going to this location and looking for it multiple times and you know there was a tattoo parlor involved in a funky upscale salon with interesting people that didn't know anything about it we weren't able to find the phone she was diligent in trying luckily we had a GSM plan so I was able to call up t-mobile and say hey guys can you please turn off their sim and I'm gonna go pick up another one at my local store all the local stores had no problem they confirmed I was who I said I was and it just handed me a new sim I popped that in an old nexus one and she was up and running and not a problem going from a Galaxy Nexus to a nexus one not that Pleasant of an experience so she was motivated and she decided you know of all the phones that are out there today I'd like another galaxy nexus so she saved her money luckily was available through the google play store for 399 now since then it's dropped another 50 bucks so fabulous there but she saved up her money and went ahead and bought a new Galaxy Nexus and the first thing that we did was we put lookout mobile security on it so we could do a little bit more stuff with locating and pinpointing where things are as well as doing remote wipes and other fun stuff that you can do with the apps like that and she got everything set up and everything was great and then chapter 3 we had some friends over one of these friends has a teenage kid and this teenage kid lost something in our couch well he went fishing for it and what did he find while he finally found my wife's phone okay well she has a Galaxy Nexus I have a Galaxy Nexus they all look exactly the same pulled it out it's dead put it on the charger we forgot about it and then my wife tried to log in to her phone and couldn't and it was odd and interesting because it was kind of like your old phone and we went looking and sure enough we have three phones so either she lost the phone in the couch or and this is the story were going with whoever it was that found her phone felt guilty about trying to keep it for themselves somehow found out where we lived snuck in and put the phone in the couch somewhere that it would make it look like we might have lost it there but we really didn't and then we could find it a later date and then they snuck out again really really creepy that that could have happened but what does that taught us well first of all google latitude is great for trying to find where someone is but it's not really good for finding out where your phone is second when you've lost your phone minutes count you've only got so much battery life and as soon as that battery goes dead chances are you're not going to find it again third you want to make sure you have an app on there like where is my droid or lookout mobile security or one of the several others that you can find that will communicate with your device after you tell it to remotely of course and say hey this is where I am and then they can either sound an alarm or give you a precise location or whatever the case may be again as long as your phone still has battery in it and as long as it's still covered by some kind of a a mobile network whether that's voice or or data preferably data but another thing to keep in mind you've got to be using a SMS plan rather than something like google voice google voice isn't going to work very well at all with these so you've got to know the number of that phone the phone itself not the google voice number but hate whoever it was they found the phone and sneakily gave it back to us and we've got it back and we learned some valuable lessons and now by sharing them with you I hope you have to if you've got some stories that you can share with us about how you've lost a phone and found it or how you've lost a phone and had to get a new one and what you did to prepare for losing your phone in the future we'd like to know head over to pocketnow.com and leave your comments down at the bottom of the article for pocket now sharing some embarrassing stories i'm joe levi bye