PC World Video
Robert Strohmeyer: Hello that's where I put it. Well hello I'm Robert Strohmeyer for PCWorld. You know I'm always losing my phone in fact just a couple of months ago I dropped my phone in the Las Vegas airport and didn't get it back for a couple of hours and had I not gotten it back I would have been in trouble with my email, my Facebook, Twitter, most of my online accounts where linked to that phone and I didn't have so much as a simple unlock patten set on it.
So, today, I'm going to show you three ways that you can protect your Android phone. But first that something which you may be familiar with if you already an Android user and that's the built-in unlock pattern. To use an unlock pattern you simply drag your finger over the dots on the screen in a preset patten that you've created and just like any other passcode it will then unlock your phone and you can go back to your business. You can set up an unlock pattern by hitting the menu key on your phone and going to settings and then go to location and security in your Android settings and click on that you create unlock pattern option and then all you have to do is draw an unlock pattern on your screen.
So, you could do pretty much anything you want the more complicated you may get the more secure you'll be. Now hopefully the next time when you get into this phone I want to be drinking because unlock patterns are much more difficult to use than conventional pass codes, but they are a good safety measures against on dialing. So the next time I need to go in I simply start up the phone and bring it by my little nine dot pattern, connect the dots, and I'm in. Another handy little trick if your phones goes wandering off on but you are pretty sure it's near by, there is a little utility called it where's my Droid and this app which is a free download from the Android market allows you to set a special passcode or phrase that you can text to your phone to set off an alarm.
So if your phone falls between a sofa cushions or under your car seat, you can just text this special phrase to your phone from any other device and it will go ahead set off the alarm. So I'm going setup the attention word as they call it on my Android. So in order to find my Android that's gone missing I'm just going to use my other droid and I'm going to type in my activation word.
Now it's important to use an activation word that isn't just for everyday speech otherwise for instance if you just hey what's up your phone could very well it would be setting off the alarm all day long. I'm kind of go ahead and send that now and you know you could also just try calling your phone the problem with that is that if your ringers down low or if your phone are in vibrate that may make no noise at all whereas this actually set up a pretty audible alarm over rides the volume on you phone, hence just hit found phone, turn it off.
Now let's say your phone really goes missing and it's not just hiding between sofa cushions. You're going to want a way to find your phone no matter where it went. For that there is a great freebie from the Android market called Mobile Defense. It's currently in Beta and may not always be free but for now it is. This app will use your phone GPS to track it wherever it goes. It will even give the ability to wipe your phones hard drive remotely in the event that it falls into the wrong hands.
So you download the app from the Android market and then register your phone on mobile defense.com and mange your phone from the web. I'll show you how, a mobile defense keeps a record of all the places your phone is checked in from hour-to-hour that even offers a map that lets you locate your phone visually. But in the map screen you can get further details on your phone set off an audible alarm that will make your phone easy to find from anyone in the room and also remotely unlock your phone if you want to give someone access to the device to help them get it back to you.
Now at the moment mobile defense's remote wide feature has been disable during the Beta but the company does intend to bring it back before launching the app officially. So with those little tricks you should be able to keep your phone safe whether it's in the same room or million miles away. For PC World I'm Robert Strohmeyer and I'll see you on the internet.
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