Has your smartphone disappeared and you feel desperate to find it? Can we really locate our lost devices remotely? What options are the best today to track and locate our own lost devices?
Until recently, the possibility of recovering a lost or stolen mobile was a daunting task that rarely had positive results.
Our phone would disappear forever and there was no human way of knowing where it was, so simply the smartest option presented to us seemed to be to forget about that event and resign ourselves to buying a new one.
Luckily, today this has changed, and what previously meant never seeing our device again, now we have one more possibility that gives us a dose of hope to reconnect with our little technological ally.
Location systems and advances in consumer technology have made it easier for more and more precise, accurate and easy-to-use systems to appear in recent years that, in addition to telling us the point on the map where our cell phone or tablet is, also They give us the possibility to access the data or to perform some actions on our devices.
Below we review what are the possibilities we have to find our phone or tablet quickly, but first you should know that in order to track them, you must first have the location systems active on our phones and tablets.
Find an Android mobile phone
Until recently, Google did not have a native system for locating Android devices.
Fortunately for all those who have an andride phone, you can now enjoy Find My Device, an updated version of the Android Device Manager system.
Through this platform we can access through the browser of our computer or from an app for mobile phones, tablets or Android Wear watch (in the latter case, provided that we have linked the smartwatch via Bluetooth to the lost device), to a map where, in addition After finding our lost cell phone, we can also do some more truly interesting things in case we can't find our devices.
This official application will help you to know the exact location of your missing device. And not only will it tell you where it is, but it will also allow us to block our phone or tablet, as well as erase all its content.
Doing so is really simple, since once you have logged into Find My Device, you will access a map where you will see the location of your Android devices in real time.
The main options that you can access from here are these:
- Play sound: It will make the selected device ring for 5 minutes at maximum volume (it doesn't matter if you had it on silent or vibrate when you last saw it).
- Lock device: It allows you to block access to your phone via PIN, unlock pattern or password, and it even allows you to add one in case you didn't have it before. In addition, it also allows you to send a message to the phone that will appear on the lock screen.
- Delete data: Very useful when we give up our phone for definitively lost. With this option we can erase all the data from the internal memory of the phone (except for the data contained in the SD card). You should know that once you use this option, you will no longer be able to use the "Find my device" function.
Finding an iPhone mobile phone
To locate a lost iPhone, we will only need to log in to icloud.com with our Apple account, or we can use the Find my iPhone app from another iPhone or iPad to continue with the next step.
Once we enter our credentials, we will receive a notification on our device to verify the login. Once you enter the code that you will see on your phone screen, you will access a menu with icons for different issues, such as Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Photos, iCloud Drive or Notes.
In this case, as we are interested in learning to locate our mobile, we will click on the Search icon.
Again we will be asked for the password and will begin to search for our device. Once it has been done, we will be able to see on the map where exactly this as well as other of our Apple devices is located, whether they are phones, tablets and even computers and headphones.
Each point on the map represents each of your devices, so if you click on the one that corresponds to your iPhone, a menu will be displayed that will allow you to perform some actions, such as:
- Play sound.
- Activate lost mode to block, track or delete information.
- Erase iPhone.
You will also access other details, such as the last time it was active or the battery level it has.
Although there are other services and applications, such as Cerberus for Android, that allow us to perform a wide variety of remote actions on our phone, the reality is that these apps can be paid or we may not have downloaded them previously. However, with these methods you will have a greater probability of successfully finding your lost phone, with the guarantee that these companies offer.