mobileu.co.uk

New technology makes mobile phones 'loss-resistant'

An East Sussex-based company has developed an anti-loss system designed to let users keep track of their mobile phones.

The i-migo is a keyring-sized stick that can be connected via Bluetooth to a mobile phone and will let off an alarm if the phone gets more than 30 feet away.

The device can also lock the phone so that no-one else can use it and will even notify your phone network that they should start tracking it using GPS.

Crucially, if you don't get your phone back, the device stores all of your data on the phone – numbers, contacts, photos – and can replicate them on to your new handset.

The device already comes with high praise, having won the 2009 UK Design Council Mobile Phone Security Challenge. The government-supported challenge tasked designers to come up with ways of securing phones and making them less desirable to thieves.

Mike Midge, director of sales and business development at Data Transfer & Communications, the company behind the device, said there was clear need for something like the i-migo and they already had patents on the technology in the US, Europe and China.

He said they wanted to penetrate the Chinese market, but were aware of the risk of piracy.

"We feel there is a very clear need for it in the China market, but the simplicity and straightforwardness of the intellectual property means you could easily replace individual functions, and that is a huge challenge," he said.