Recently my wife lost her mobile phone. We knew that the chances of getting it back were remote. Yet, there were a few formalities to be completed. So the whole day I kept calling up the lost phone’s number and as expected I got a “It is switched off” message. In the meantime I also informed the phone company about it and asked them to stop any outgoing calls.

I use a Nokia 3650 (pretty old fashioned..eh?) and have been using it for the past 4 years. I remember that once I had downloaded a third-party software which was called something like Anti-theft (I don’t remember the exact name). Anyway, the software worked like this.

You install it on your phone’s internal memory (not on the memory card). Then you add the phone number of your another mobile or may be one of your friend’s numbers and activate the application.
Now if you lose your phone, the person who finds it and plans to keep it too, will most definitely change the SIM before trying to use the phone. The moment he changes the SIM and switches on the phone, our Anti-Theft application will send a predefined SMS text to the mobile number that we stored earlier. Once, the message is received, we can find the phone number from where the message originated. How you get back the phone from that person is up to you.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I was wondering, if phone manufacturers can include so many bells and whistles to their phones, why can’t they provide softwares like these which are a must-have and extremely useful? It is great to have an MP3 player, great games, a 2MP camera,photo editing softwares etc. But these can be fun only if you have your phone with you in the first place.

I am sure a phone with such a security feature will be greatly welcomed because for some, losing their mobile is like losing an arm.

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