How often have you been in a situation where you have misplaced your cell phone somewhere in and around your home and struggled a lot to find it out again? Well, I know that you all might be thinking why not give a call to the phone in this situation so that when it rings, you can easily find the phone back. But what if you had kept the handset in silent mode? In this situation, it would be difficult to find the handset. This is where the app Where’s My Droid comes to your rescue.
I have been in the above situation a umpteen number of times and since I always keep my cell phone in silent mode, I will find it a lot difficult to find my cell phone back. Recently I got a new android phone and I was going through the Android market and this is when I found out this wonderful and useful app. So, I thought of writing a small piece of a How-to guide for the Where’s My Droid app so that it would be very useful to other Android users who often misplace their handsets and struggle a lot to find it back.
Where’s My Droid app helps you to find out your misplaced Android cell phone very easily and all that costs you is an SMS that you are required to send to your misplaced Android phone. The app makes use of what is called an Attention word (to be sent in the form of an SMS) to disable Silent/Vibrate ringing mode of your handset.
You can use two attention words to find out your misplaced phone. One attention word can be used to disable your cell phone from silent/Vibrate ringing mode so that when you send the attention word as an SMS to your misplaced phone, it starts ringing loudly and the other attention word can be used to find out the location of you phone via GPS and note that for GPS location tracking to work, you should already have the GPS enabled on your misplaced phone.
Other options that are available in the application are you can change the duration of the time that phone is supposed to ring after you send the attention word as an SMS to the phone. Instead of having a ring tone set as an indication to find your phone’s location, the app lets you to have a siren noise that will produce more sound than the usual ring tone which in turn will make it a lot easier to find out your misplaced phone.
Another wonderful thing about this app is that, it has great security settings. You can set a passcode for the app so that, nobody other than you using your phone will get easy access into the application and change the attention words that is set by you.
You can download Where’s My Droid application for free from the Android market.
NOTE: - Try this application once as soon as you install it on your Android device because you never know when you misplace or lose your phone and if you try this application now, you will find it easy at a later time to use the application without any glitches when you do lose or misplace your phone.
Here’s how the application works
Once you have the application installed on your Android device, open the application by tapping on its icon present on your home screen.
Now, you should see the Where’s My Droid application settings window opened on your Android phone.
In the Setting window, you will see the Attention word option at the top. Tap on that to have your own attention word set (for example, set the attention word as rings). By default, a random word will be set as the attention word. Once you set the attention word, tap on OK.
Again in the Settings window, tap on Attention word for GPS option to change the default attention word and once you have finished setting the attention word for GPS, Tap on OK.
Now, activate silent mode in your Android cell phone and place it somewhere in and around your house. Using another cell phone, send the attention keyword that you set previously as an SMS to your Android Phone. As soon as the message is delivered on your Phone, it starts ringing.
In case, if you have misplaced the phone somewhere outside your house, you can use the attention word for GPS to find out the exact location of your phone. To do this, send the attention word for GPS that you had set previously as an SMS to your misplaced android phone and as soon as the message is delivered, you will get to know the location of your phone via GPS.
NOTE: - for GPS to work, the cell phone from which you send the message should also have the GPS feature enabled and also the GPS on your misplaced android phone should also be enabled.
So, overall Where’s My Droid is a wonderful and a very useful app that should be a part of all users having Android Smartphones. The app is easy to use, installs without any glitches, works flawless and on top of everything, the app is available absolutely for free.