Lose An Android Phone? It's Good To Have A Plan B

You can even install this find my phone app after you lost it

Losing your phone, especially if it is still fairly new can be an expensive and traumatizing event. The first thing on your mind is all of the personal information you have on that phone. Next, what is it going to cost me to replace it? What a pain in the butt. But it doesn't have to be that way if you have Plan B.

Plan B is a find my phone app available for Android phones for free in the Android marketplace. There are other find my phone apps for Android and other phones as well.  Apple makes their version available for everyone now after first charging for it as part of the ME service.  AT&T offers a track phone option, but it can get pretty pricey. One of the nice things about Plan B is that it is free.  But the thing that I like best about and what has saved my sons bacon twice now is that you can install it after your phone is lost or stolen.

My 12 year old son got an Android phone for his birthday in August.  Putting aside the discussion over why a 12 year old needs a state-of-the-art smartphone for a moment (but Dad all of the kids have them), my son like most boys his age would lose his head if it wasn't attached to his body. Sure enough in late September he came home crying that "someone stole his phone".  How did he know it was stolen? Easy it wasn't in his backpack where he left it. He had not installed anything on the phone to track it and we had not even known about the AT&T service to track phones, even it is expensive.  In any event the AT&T service had to be turned on before the phone was lost, so it was not an option.

Faced with the prospect of paying 25 dollars a month for the existing contract on this phone for another 23 months and having to buy another phone, I was needless to say not a happy camper.  It was then that I did a little poking around the Android Market and came across Plan B by Lookout Labs. Using the deliver over air feature available to Android, we actually installed Plan B on the stolen phone.  I then SMS messaged the word "locate" to the phone and within minutes I was receiving email from the phone with its location on a Google map. Each message refines the location down to just a few meters. We quickly located the stolen phone, in the bottom of my son's bookbag!

Plan B came to the rescue again yesterday. We had been on a weekend cruise out of Miami to the Bahamas. When we arrived home yesterday my son had that panicked look again. This time someone on the boat must have stolen his phone. After a search of all of his bags, the phone was not there.  Once again I messaged "locate" to his phone and within a few minutes we saw that the phone was still aboard the ship.  I called Carnival and they said they would go to his room and look for it. Within a few hours I was tracking his phone heading to the Carnival HQ in Miami.  We should be able to get it today.  

Having a plan b in life is always a good plan, but having Plan B for your Android phone is a lifesaver! But lets be clear, if your phone is stolen and someone knows a little bit about tech, they can overcome it. The phone has to be turned on to work for instance. If your SIM card is removed it won't work or if they just do a factory reset it won't work. So it won't save you all the time, but for run of the mill, leaving your phone somewhere it can be a lifesaver!

• Wireless / Mobile
• Smartphones
• Android
• Android Market
• iPhone
• plan b