What Should I Do If My Cell Phone is Stolen

If your cell phone is stolen, the first step is to suspend your account so people cannot make expensive calls or texts to others using your phone. Depending upon the type of service you use, you may either need to call the service or use their Internet reporting service to stop the line from working. Most believe that this should be done as soon as possible, since people can immediately begin to make expensive calls from your phone. Failure to report promptly if your cell phone is stolen could mean you are responsible for some of the calls made by the thief.

Many cell phone companies also sell additional insurance that can help one cover these costs if your cell phone is stolen. Some cell phone insurance also can cover the cost of replacing the phone. If you purchased your phone and contracted with a service at the same time, you may have to spend significantly more to replace the phone. Cell phone companies often offer excellent deals to new customers, but for established customers, a brand new cell phone can come at a high price, especially if is replacing an elaborate or expensive phone.

Cell phone insurance may also be purchased from private companies and help to protect call costs and materials if your cell phone is stolen. However, be certain not to pay for double insurance. For example, some home and renter’s insurance, and some auto insurance may cover replacement of a cell phone. If your cell phone is stolen from your vehicle or home, you may be eligible for replacement under one of these plans. However, if your cell phone is stolen when you are outside, you may not have coverage under these plans.

If your cell phone is stolen and is a prepaid phone, you can still request that service be stopped to the phone. However, your cell phone will stop working the moment the thief runs out of pre-purchased minutes. In these cases, you might want to risk the minutes for a day or two, to see if anyone has merely found your cell phone and wishes to return it to you. It’s a good idea to keep your home number listed in your call list, so that someone who finds a lost phone has the chance to return it to you.

With many prepaid services, replacing the cellphone is less expensive, provided the model you use is fairly simple. It may not be worth it to purchase cell phone insurance. More expensive phone models may make insurance well worth the cost. The cost of replacing your phone may not be worth the insurance expense if your cell phone is stolen. However, you should still report the theft to both your cell phone service provider and your local police department if your cell phone is stolen, at least within a few days, since the company can then make it impossible for someone to have your number, receive your calls, and purchase new minutes on the phone. 

About one in four cell phones are lost, damaged or stolen. Cell phone insurance often covers you not only if your cell phone is stolen, but also if it is lost or damaged. You should treat a lost phone as if your cell phone is stolen. Report the loss and hope for the best. It is often possible to reinstate the line if your phone is returned to you, or if you find it on your own.

What is a Cell Phone App

A cell phone app is the cool way of saying cell phone application. These applications are add-ons or bits of data added to a cell phone so it can perform functions usually unrelated to making a phone call. Cell phones always did come with a few extra things unrelated to making phone calls, but these have greatly expanded, and now many people download the extra the apps they want. 

Many of the early cell phone app programs were designed to make a cellphone more like a computer. They often integrated some of the computer elements into the phone. While many of these early programs continue to be updated and used to track things like business performance or email, they are only the tip of the iceberg in modern cell phone app offerings.

Applications on a cellphone can provide the phone with additional function and use. For instance, people can now surf the net, blog, contribute to their twitter accounts, or play simple to complex games. A cell phone app might be able to find the location of a friend or turn the phone into a calculator. There are even SAT study apps, and ones that can teach people various subjects or help with studying for school.

Some of the very interesting cell phone apps may be of great help in the medical field. For instance, an app can be used to record heart rate over a period of time and send this to a doctor for review. Some cell phones have a tracking mechanism for blood sugar that can be useful for diabetics. 

A few cell phone apps are more for entertainment than serious purpose. Taking their cue from MP3 players, many cellphones now allow people to find the name of song, download a song, and/or play music just as an MP3 player does. Certain apps allow people to play games together over separate cellphones. 

The increase in the cell phone app market has been in part due to advancements in cell phone design. Especially any version of the smartphone, where the phone is more complex in design and has many elements in common with a personal computer, is better able to run apps and lots of them. For instance, companies like Apple® have an app store, with applications best suited for the iPhone®. Other companies are certainly following suit, and the number of potential apps available is fairly daunting; over 10,000 are available for the iPhone® alone.

Since most cellphones aren’t suited to holding every cell phone app, it may be wise to use some discretion when choosing which ones to purchase for a phone. They aren’t always compatible, either. A cool Blackberry® app may not run on an iPhone® and vice versa.

What is a Thumb Drive

Computer users long complained that 3-inch floppy disks were too unstable, the ZIP drive not practical and CD-Rs not portable enough for data storage. The technology geeks solved this problem in ingenious fashion: the thumb drive. IBM came out with thumb drives in 1998, as a solution for replacing the less stable floppy disks. Their use caught on quickly, and as portable data storage has become more of an issue, thumb drives or flash drives skyrocketed in popularity. They can now be seen hanging on lanyards around the necks of computer users everywhere.

A thumb drive is portable memory storage. It is re-writeable and holds its memory without a power supply, unlike RAM. Thumb drives will fit into any USB port on a computer. They will also "hot swap," which means a user can plug the drive into a computer and will not have to restart it to access the thumb drive. The drives are small, about the size of a human thumb - hence, their name - and are very stable memory storage devices.

At first, some users saw their lack of compatibility with Windows 98 as a drawback of thumb drives, since so many users were still running that operating system when the drives were introduced. However, most thumb drives came equipped with software that installed a Win98 driver on the computer, enabling the user to connect a thumb drive. Installing the software took about 60 seconds. Thumb drives also pose security threats, since they are easily concealed. Users could copy proprietary information to them, or upload hacking software from them, all undetected by the system administrator. 

However, system administrators can also upload anti-virus software to an infected computer from a thumb drive, for instance, without risking the system servers. Their write speeds and read speeds only really come into play when users are running large applications from them. When the user is saving text documents or photos, for instance, these speeds are not nearly as important. Most thumb drives also have millions of re-write cycles and will store data for ten years before they need replacing.

The thumb drive is available in storage sizes of up to 16 gigabytes. Most people, however, will find that sizes of 256 megabytes to 512 MB will do nicely. If the person is storing mostly text, with few images, then an even smaller thumb drive may meet the need.

A thumb drive is available anywhere computer supplies are sold. They range in price from about US$15 to $75 or so for a large-capacity drive. They are stable, versatile, durable and portable data storage devices. As such they are ideal for almost any computer user who wants safe, long-term storage for a low price.