Paranoid Android

As the gap between phone and computer closes rapidly our mobile devices get more sensitive information stored on them. Not just sensitive as in “me naked with hot squirrel” pictures but more as in photos in general, direct access to your social sites, SMS/MMS, Notes and so forth.

The thought of this getting in the wrong hands is indeed more disturbing than back in the days when all you lost was contacts and SMS. Even that sucked pretty badly. And not to forget; you don’t know where your 400$ phone is!

Enter WaveSecure Mobile Security for Android/Windows Mobile/Symbian. With this service you’re amongst other things able to remotely:

• Lock
  This one’s pretty useless as the thief can bypass this with a factory-reset of the device. By locking the phone you’re pretty much forcing the thief to do so. Only reason to do this is prohibiting the thief to make calls when first finding the phone as he/she doesn’t have to enter the PIN until reboot/reset.

• Backup
  As long as there’s an active SIM in your lost phone you’ll be able to backup some of your information. At the moment you’re able to backup Contacts, SMS and Call Logs. With that said you’d be better of using services such as Gmail to synchronize Contacts, Calendar, and Mail than relying on this service.

  Still, this feature is of great use. You’re probably not that interested in getting back your Call Logs, but  if you do a backup of the Call Logs and SMS, whose Call Logs, Contacts and SMS would you get besides your own? That’s right; the thieves. Clever you

• Wipe
  Erase all your Contacts, SMS, Photos, Videos and the Storage Card. Great stuff if you’re the president and don’t like the idea of those “me naked with squirrel” pics getting in the wrong hands.

• Track
  The tracking consists of two nifty features. The first being able to locate your phone on Google Maps through some kind of triangulation, I guess. This doesn’t give you GPS-accuracy of the location but is does give you an idea – take or give a couple of hundred meters.The second feature shows you the phone number of the SIM-card currently in your phone. You’re also able to configure your phone to send out an SMS to up to nine of your friends/contacts upon SIM-switch.

So what’s the catch? At the moment none for Android users. Just head over to Android Market and install before 31 January for free lifetime subscription. The official price is 5€/3 months or 15€/1 year after that.