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Saturday 16 October 2010

Defending my Mobile

I've just installed an app on my Nokia smartphone called Anti-theft for Mobile, partly because I've been thinking for a while that I should have some way of protecting my phone in the event of me losing it, but mainly because I found out that it's free from the Nokia OVI store.

Now, if I find I've lost my phone, I can send it a text message to lock it, locate it, or even wipe it clean. Of course, by definition I won't have a mobile phone with me when I realise this, but eventually I'll be able to get my hands on one and send the necessary message.

Two thoughts now occur to me. To begin with, unless I lose my phone in the next few days, I will almost certainly not be able to remember what it is I'm supposed to send to lock the missing mobile. Normally I would make a note of this in my smartphone, but clearly that's not going to cut it in this situation. Secondly, I can't be sure that the program will work unless I test it. However, there are three possible outcomes to this experiment: it might work flawlessly, it might not work at all, or it might lock the phone but not let me unlock it.

As this app must have been downloaded many, many times by now, you'd think I should be reasonably confident that it will work properly. And yet...there are so many times when software has decided to fail on me in ways that (according to Google) nobody else in the world has ever experienced.

My two year contract expires soon and I'll be getting a new phone. Very tempting to think that that would be the ideal time to risk bricking my Nokia.

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