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 …
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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