GPS alarm seems alarmingly useless
The Freedom Personal Safety is a GPS device that's supposed to alert loved ones that you're in trouble, but actually seems about as trustworthy as the only other man in the train carriage who appears to have moved a seat closer to you every time you look. The product will set you back £79.95, but comes in a nice yellow box which …
How long before GPS products polled by text are compulsory along with ID cards??!?!
Given that it uses GPS so needs access to clearish skies, and if it needs your phone I'm guessing it uses your mobile connection, it presumably only improves safety if you're not: in a building, travelling on the underground, in a remote area with no phone reception, overseas with roaming disabled, etc etc...
So as long as you're outside, in an urban area you're fine.
How thick is it? About 7mm? My desk leg is missing about that much, it might be just the thing I need to stop the whole desk wobbling.
Given all the expensive (and largely superfluous) features on my mobile phone, I've wondered for years why there isn't a simple panic button. Not connected to the police - I suspect they'd quickly get fed up with false alarms. But merely user-set to phone someone else at the press of a button.
I know I can do this by pre-setting one of the keys, but that still involves unlocking the phone and making a call - a dedicated programmable button to send a recorded voice message with a high-urgency tag of some kind wouldn't seem to be rocket science. I suspect a lot of parents would be very happy to have this feature on their children's phones.
And it would have the added benefit over folded paper that I would always know where my desk was.
For that sort of price, I would be expecting to see some sort of direct contact capability - ie its own GPRS or WiFi radio.
@John 186
My Samsung G600 has this option. I only have to press the volume button four times and it will call my wife (with a Star Trek style alarm). She presses the call button and gets through immediately to my phone without me needing to touch it.
Not used it yet thankfully and so far have not had any false alarms.
TFA said: "To be fair we only had a couple of crashes "
Appearing below a picture of a car key.
ROFL icon please.
Thanks for that. Possibly not too late to drop hints for Xmas...
One thing I wonder is whether it has the same problems as say sat nav's whereby if you don't update them every week they lose track of where the nearest GPS satellites are and thus spend 30+ seconds trying to find them?
Also, one good use for something like this would be during a mugging or similar, but presumably a likely target then would be said mobile smartphone which kindof breaks the whole thing. Also of course prevents the button on the smartphone idea from working, but then perhaps the best idea would be a personal attack alarm or this device doing the sending itself? Now that would be useful.
Maybe v2 will actually solve a problem.
My previous company designed one that is tiny, grabs GPS every 10-30mins so it's got some idea of where you are (and doesn't drain the battery constantly) and then when activated tries to get the latest coords (if not sends the last one, it indicates this in the text message) sends a text message or two with the GPS coords in it to one or more phones.
Runs off 2 AA batteries...
British designed too.
Hey, that's a really good idea. I think a bit of mobile-coding may be done tonight...
Pretty much all samsung handsets will do this nowadays, some will even send a text to a pre selected number if the sim is removed and replaced with a new one.
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