Sometimes I put my phone on silent. And sometimes I can’t find my phone. When these two things happen in conjunction with each other, it’s Terrible.
If my phone is on silent but I can see it, no problem. If I can’t see it but I can hear it, no problem. But if I can’t see it AND I can’t hear it, then it’s Terrible because I can’t call myself from someone else’s phone and then hear my phone ring and find out that it’s behind the couch or in the pocket of the jacket that I wore last night, because my phone won’t make any noise.
When my phone is on silent and I set the alarm, the phone doesn’t ring when someone calls, but it still makes a sound when it’s time for the alarm to go off. That’s nice. A silent alarm wouldn’t be much help. What’s also not much help is when my phone doesn’t make any noise when I’m trying to call it in order to find it. So it would be nice if The People Who Make Phones would make it so that my phone would make some noise when I’m trying to find it. That would be a smart phone. Perhaps they could do this by having a rule that if my phone was called by the same number 3 times within 3 minutes, then the 3rd time it would start to ring normally and not silently. Or maybe I could send a text to my phone that said, “Hey, I’m trying to find you. Please unsilence yourself.” Or maybe the text message would be just “unsilence”. Then I could find my phone.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
I wish the title of this article could be “How to Unsilence Your Phone”. Step 1: Send yourself a text message that says “unsilence”. Instead, it’s 2 steps. Step 1: Write a blog post. Step 2: Wait.
One idea would be that you could call your phone with a #passcode to ring…
Good point. If you thought that people might be remotely unsilencing your phone as a prank, then it would be nice to have the option of requiring a passcode for remote unsilencing.
An app called Lookout will make your phone “scream” (their words, not mine) when you can’t find it, even if it’s silenced. I’ve used it twice for that very reason since I got it a couple of months ago. I’m that kind of scatterbrain.
It’ll also find the last location of your phone on a map, and scan apps for viruses. Pretty handy, also free.
Very cool. Thanks for pointing that out, Debbie! https://www.mylookout.com/features/missing-device/