Android Wear can now locate your missing phone

20 Mar 2015

Android Wear, via Android.com

Android Device Manager, the tool used to locate your lost or stolen smartphone, has now been paired up with Android Wear.

Finding your lost phone is an understandably big worry for people all over the world, with significant improvements on tracking, finding, securing and retrieving stolen or misplaced devices changing things for the better in the past two years.

Now, as we enter the age of smart wearables, Android has made a significant change. Being rolled out over the coming weeks, users will now be able to locate their phone by talking to their wrist.

“To use this new feature, just say ‘Ok, Google. Start. Find my phone,’ or select the ‘Find my phone’ option in the start menu,” says Andrew Flynn, an Android software engineer.

By taking either of these steps, your phone will ring at full volume, letting you locate it – better still, you don’t have to do anything. Your Android Wear will simply update with the new service over the next few weeks.

Android Wear

Android Wear can now locate your missing phone through Android Device Manager. Via Android.com

If that’s not good enough, you can always go online and log into your Google account to access the full Android Device Manager, which can let you trace it in real time, lock it or even erase all your details and restore it to its factory settings.

Security around smartphones has increased a lot in the past two years, with variants on ‘Kill Switches’ across most devices dissuading many thefts, it seems.

Robberies of iPhones, specifically, have dropped 40pc in San Francisco and 25pc in New York in the year since the kill switch was launched, with overall smartphone thefts down 27pc and 16pc respectively.

In London the drop was greater still, with thefts of all phones reduced by half, but its Apple’s early adoption of the politically pressured kill switch that has been most successful.

Android’s embracing of similar technology with regards its wearables, so, is yet another welcome step.

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com