One of the greatest threats to our personal welfare in the digital age is the theft of our key life-enhancing devices – while a stolen bag, camera, or wallet can be replaced at significant heartache and expense, a laptop might contain the keys to your banks accounts, employer's intranet, or your identity. Now there’s an ingenious anti-theft device which sets a user-defined protection radius of between one and 30 meters around the mobile phone in your pocket using Bluetooth functionality. The credit-card-sized, EUR60 Secu4 Blue Watchdog is so useful it just might generate killer app adoption levels for protecting your valuables, luggage, and perhaps even your children when you’re on the go.
The Blue Watchdog is slightly larger than a credit card at 76mm x 46mm x 4.5mm and weighs in at just 20 gram. It’s small enough to fit inside your wallet, a child’s pocket, and can be neatly tucked out of sight in a laptop bag or luggage.
Once you own the Blue Watchdog (BW), it’s a simple matter to download an app for your mobile phone from the internet, pairing the BW with it via Bluetooth and setting your preferences. From that point forward, your mobile phone will alert you via your mobile phone the moment the BW gets further away from your mobile phone than the distance you have specified - from one metre to 30 metres.
With a stand-by time of 120 hours, the BW’s 3.7 volt Lithium Polymer battery offers five continuous days of vigilance and active protection. The BW comes with it’s own charger though it can also be recharged from your computer via a USB port.
In addition to the mobile phone alerting you, you can also choose to have the BW sound it’s 100 db alarm which has been found to usually be more than enough for a thief to drop the said item and run.
Of course, there are potential issues, such as losing the Bluetooth connection between your phone and the BW, which might set off a piercing alarm in an inappropriate venue – maybe in a seminar or business presentation, or worse, on board an aircraft where 100 db is certain to raise the blood pressure of the security folk.
Or maybe you might have a momentary lapse and slip your mobile into your bag, which of course renders the system useless.
Worse still, you might get your mobile phone stolen and be left looking like the thief because it’ll be you holding the 100 db bag. We’re intending to try the BW in the near future and we’ll let you know just how potentially problematic these issues might be.
The Blue Watchdog is manufactured in Switzerland and is compatible with more than 80% of phones in use in America and Europe. There’s a complete list of phones compatible with the BW on the Secu4 web site.
0 comments
Post a Comment