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Hey everybody,
On our iPad it's possible to remotely lock it if it's ever lost/stolen. Also you can "find it" by having it show up on a map where it is. Also it will send out a single and make it beep if it's lost in your house (we all know it happens).
Is there an equivalent app/method to do this for the PlayBook? I figure I better do it sooner rather than later...
Not yet... but hoping there will be a update for it soon, where you can have Blackberry Protect.
RIM's answer: If you are worried about the security of your lost phone, you just use bridge instead of the native apps. Also, instead of recovering the lost one, just buy a new one as they are so cheap now. :D
As jafobabe said, not yet, but we certainly expect to see it in the future, presumably no later than when the BB10 phones launch very late this year. Can you really imagine a leading-edge new BlackBerry phone without Protect support?
Exactly what they may do with the WiFi-only PlayBooks is anyone's guess of course. I would certainly be willing to pay a small monthly fee for Protect and probably a few other services which we don't yet have.
Such 'Find My Gadget' applications make promises that wifi-only gadgets can't keep.
Here's how they fail: Your iPod is lost or stolen. The finder or thief takes it home, but they can't get past the lock screen. The iPod can't connect to the Internet without human assistance because the wifi at his house has a password. So you sit at home trying again and again to find it. FAIL.
The only hope is that you suspect that you know who has it. So you pack *your* wifi router (already known to the lost iPod) and an AC inverter, a laptop, and a mobile Internet tethering solution into your car and park just outside the suspect's house. If you can organize all this before the iPod's battery runs out, then you can hopefully allow your iPod in the suspect's house to connect to the Internet via all the gear crammed into your car parked just outside his house and then, the Find My Gadget app will work perfectly! LOL.
3G-enabled gadgets are obviously less troublesome.
JeffyPooh's got a good point. :-(
I suppose there's still potential value in several ways though. For one thing, you may not have yours protected with a password... If the Protect feature were enabled and required you enter your BBID again to disable it, then that would still provide significant benefits: remote backup, wipe, geolocation, and the related bits, but only if the person who found it did let it connect somewhere.
Another point: I think you can configure it to auto-connect to unsecured hotspots, can't you? I had mine in my pocket during a walk downtown the other day and at one point noticed it had WiFi connectivity though a router named "dlink" (heh... no surprise there).
Lastly, they could if they wanted presumably come up with a way to tie it to the PIN of the device, so that even if someone stole it and wiped it, the Protect feature could still let the real owner find it. Obviously there are complicated things to sort out with ensuring the binding between that PIN and the original owner is removed in case of a legitimate sale (or a store return etc) but I would think that could be sorted out if it were considered desirable.
Remote wipe and such would not be useful in that case, since the original owner's data would already have been removed by the security wipe performed by the thief.
The finder or thief is probably not going bring it to Starbucks. The odds of it randomly connecting is very low.
Device Lock Screens should have a place to display the owner's contact information and reward-for-return details. The fact that this obvious requirement is not yet standard on every modern gadget reveals just how little foresight humans actually have.
I posted this in a separate thread. I edited my wallpaper. But a number of folks replied that taping a business card into the case or to the back of the pb was just as practical.