Database Users

Theft Tracker?

I almost got my phone stolen(some friend my friend is)and was wondering if there was a way to track my phone if it gets stolen. I paid $400 for my g1 and I don't want it stolen.

I know there are a number of different programs that can track the phones location and others can log online to a website and look at your current location. However, The GPS will need to be on and the program would need to be running. There are a few different programs, I tested out FirePin, it worked nice, but had no need for it and the online account was free.

I'd suggest PinTail from the market. You set up a pin code on the G1. When you want to locate it, you send a text message saying "locate <pin code>". The G1 gets your GPS location and texts back the coordinates and even a map link.

Just downloaded this app and its pretty cool and works very well... just have to make sure the other half doesn't get hold of the pin code! hehe

philje123 said:
Just downloaded this app and its pretty cool and works very well... just have to make sure the other half doesn't get hold of the pin code! hehe
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Also i Suggest adding That annoying LOCK screen to it... it saves wonders... Now if they only made a program you could set the default lock timeout.

not that this is a Pintail thread but I see how this could be useful but not great. If whoever has your phone has access to its menu they can change the pin which makes the application useless once your phone is gone.
just my 2 cents. If there was a way to lock out changing the pin, that would be useful, but on the same note it uninstalling this app should also require some sort of pw/pin

Could be pretty useful too if you loose the phone (Not actually theft)... Eg, I once left my mobile out at college and didn't realise... Sure it may not be accurate enough to know the exact room but it'd have stopped me spending so long searching around the house!

gps tracker on the andriod market works great and is the best

agrees gps tracker worked nice for me ... however there is no way to trigger the gps and initialize the tracking. i have my POWER MANAGER Set that way when my phone turns on, it gets plugged in or unplugged it turns on gps and cell location.
so depending on how prone u might b to loosing ur phone this is the best i would think. unless someone was familiar with android ... otherwise this method would have plenty of time to get coordinates

Is there a way to remotely turn GPS on? Like the "Force Ring" app changes ring volume to high when the phone is texted with a pin. Would be a nice app if you could remotely turn the lock screen on and turn GPS on by way of text. Anyone know if thats possible?
aad4321 said:
if the g1 had a built in battery with the screen lock enabled this could allow the owner of the phone to have time to track the phone. as soon as that phone is off and sim is removed, its gone...
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Built in battery would be a must

Power control of the Vogue

Maybe this shows that I am a noob, but here it goes.
I want to save my battary power when running the GPS, but all the power saveing settings turn the phone onto standby, thus loosing GPS lock (and when I am using my better bluetooth GPS, it locks out the bluetooth and I have to re-boot). Is there some why to just turn of the screen? Is that "an app for that"? I am currently trying out SVM Power Manager, but you can not set it to turn the screen off in 2 minites or whatever. To use it how I need, I would have to turn off the OS's power saver, and always manualy turn off the screen using SVM Power Manager. All the power manager apps I have seen work like that.
Help!

you will probably have to buy an extended battery man. i think even real android phones batteries drain pretty quick from what i hear.

Did some testing. It seems that the battery will last for about 5h with the screen of (using SVM Power Manager to turn it off), and the GPS running (GPSed running it).
Understood that the battery is just under powered, but I was wondering if there was a way to make the screen automaticaly turn off after X amount of time, but not have the phone go into standby.
I also bought one of those battery powered battery chargers (battery extender). But the one I got turned out to have only 500mAh (compared with 1100mAh in the phone battery), so it turned out to only help a bit. Maybe I will try to make one with a voltage regulator and a rechargable 9V battery

I think one of the pmsleepmodes may support this (in default.txt) Try 2 or 3. It seems like one of these didnt do a full power collapse, but did turn the screen off.

katmandu421: I am not familiar with this stuff. Can you give me a bit of a more detailed explination?
Is this a built in windows mobile funciton. Can I access this in the registry?

I love it how most of us would assume he's talking Android. Yes in android, editing your default.txt to sleep mode 0 would turn off the screen, but not sleep the system. 1,2, or 3 would allow the different system board types used in various Vogues to go to sleep.
WinMo however is a different story. The GPS in the Vogue is a low power chip, but from everything I can gather is requires the system to stay fully awake. If you find an app that allows you to turn off your screen, post back but I don't believe there is much hope to that. Windows seems to think that when the lights go out, it's sleepy time.
Also, the radio on the Vogue doesn't sleep, and it's use to wake up the phone i.e. incoming calls. The GPS is part of the radio so if there is a way to keep the system board awake, in theory it should work.

SVM Power Manager will turn off the screen while keeping everything awake, but it is not automatic. I have maped the camera button to this program, so it is not a huge hassle, but I realy would like to have it automatic.
Will consider installing Android.

Titus_Andronicus said:
SVM Power Manager will turn off the screen while keeping everything awake, but it is not automatic. I have maped the camera button to this program, so it is not a huge hassle, but I realy would like to have it automatic.
Will consider installing Android.
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Did anyone ever figure out how to do this? I'm trying to figure this out as well. After finally getting GPS to work, now I'd like to be able to use some apps that need to run when in standby.

mnations said:
Did anyone ever figure out how to do this? I'm trying to figure this out as well. After finally getting GPS to work, now I'd like to be able to use some apps that need to run when in standby.
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Check on Dev&Hacking. An app just came out today that does exactly what you are asking for here.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=707458
Enjoy

egzthunder1 said:
Check on Dev&Hacking. An app just came out today that does exactly what you are asking for here.
Enjoy
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Thanks! That looks like a handy app.
An update (in case anyone hits this thread later)...I made this one change which seemed to clear up all of the problems (found elsewhere but can't post outside link yet.)
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\ConnMgr\Providers\{7C4B7A3 8-5FF7-4bc1-80F6-5DA7870BB1AA}\Connections\Phone as Modem]
"Enabled"=dword:00000000"
Now this is in conjunction with QuickGPS and all the other fiddling I've done, so I don't if this alone is responsible.
However, when running Google Maps or other GPS applications I get a lock within 5-15 secs. Also, when coming back from standby it's able to re-lock in the same amount of time. This normally required a soft restart before.
For apps that track your routes, such as SportyPal which I've been using for mapping my bike rides, they can keep a lock even in standby mode. I'm not sure if the app itself is able to hold a lock or if QuickGPS may be helping it. Either way it works.

Disable Hardware Buttons

Hi All,
in the company I work for we use a range of XDA's for our drivers, the current and most popular one is the HD2, however i have noticed that drivers are able to put the XDA to standby, normally this is a requirement, however for the system we are using it causes major issues and provides the driver a way to cheat the system.
What im looking for it a way to disable the hardware buttons when the device is switched on, i imagine there may be a registry edit, but im not sure and need help as this is becoming a pressing issue.
Thanks
M

Your request is very peculiar, and I seriously doubt that you can achieve something like that, after all completely disabling the hardware buttons can impair seriously the functionality of the device and I don't think there is a pre-set method to do that.
Anyway, I've seen a thread that talked about reassigning the shortpress on power button to something else (and I'm talking about shortpress, not longpress), yet this didn't work on the HD2 when I tested it this morning.
Anyway, if your system is debunked by putting the device in standby, it will also troubled by simply removing the battery. In other words, you can put a strong password to forbid a user from turnning off a pc from the start menu, but you cannot forbid this user from pulling the plug off the mains
Anyway, a very feeble solution could be making so that whatever is that's thrown off by the standby, keeps working even in standby; there's a tweak for wifi that allows wifi radio to stay on during standby, and probably forcing the wifi always on, and tweaking it from bsb to be on even during standby, it will also force the CPU of the device to be on even if you lock the phone by press endkey

Dont really want to give too much away, but our application uses gprs/3g and gps constantly, and by going into standby it loses connection with our servers and gps, thus allowing users to go standby in one area and then turn back on somewhere else but system thinks they are in area 1 until they move to antoher area again. this causes a major issue and headache for me, so what i really need is for the app to remain live when in standby and to keep the data and gps connection live
hope that makes sense

Hi,
These threads may help:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=6417238
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=661472

had a look at those links and the second won looked like a winner, but when hit the HW power button the device still goes off, however i noticed that it kept its gprs connection, but it still lost gps which is one of the main factors. Just need some way to stop the device from turning off, apart from removing the case and then removing the buttons

railto said:
had a look at those links and the second won looked like a winner, but when hit the HW power button the device still goes off, however i noticed that it kept its gprs connection, but it still lost gps which is one of the main factors. Just need some way to stop the device from turning off, apart from removing the case and then removing the buttons
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try this:
Change this with your registery
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Power\State\Resuming]
"gps0:"=dword:00000001
"gpd0:"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Power\State\Unattended]
"gps0:"=dword:00000001
"gpd0:"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Power\State\Suspend]
"gps0:"=dword:00000001
"gpd0:"=dword:00000001
Normaly the numbers are on "4" - put this on "1" and gps should stay awake even when you put the phone in standby.
It will stay on until a program stops using the gps.
found it here
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=676267

railto said:
had a look at those links and the second won looked like a winner
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Click to collapse
It's the first one you should try. Works fine for me.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=6416870&postcount=6
But frankly if they do it on purpose they will no doubt find other ways to do it - so you should rather build in some protection in your software to detect it, like if 2 consecutive positions are at the same place but with more than a certain amount of time apart, it's that they turned the thing off / cut connection on purpose/...
EDIT: wilcovh beat me to it.

those reg edits have been confirmed not to work... at the time being there is no way to have the GPS stay on while in standby, and that's a pity. I am personally interested in this and have researched in the forums, yet no working method was devised (yet). And I would love to be corrected by someone, but all the solutions I found were app specific (as in, app turns off screen without turning off GPS).
So, unless the drivers should have a personal reason to "cheat" the system by turning off the GPS, just instruct them not to press that button
If they just want to turn off the display, you can make it so that they do just that without actually locking the device, by associating, as I did, longpress on send key, with xdashutdown /lightsout command. That will turn off the screen but the phne won't be locked nor put to standby.

the theory of having gps active while on standby is moot and now useless, i need to stop the device going into standby mode period

to my best knowledge you can't really do that; I mean, you can programmatically disable automatica standby in an app by calling a function to reset the idle timer, yet the power button will put the device into standby.
I'm almost positive neither AEbutton plus can remap the power button short press on the HD2, but giving it a try won't hurt that much

railto said:
the theory of having gps active while on standby is moot and now useless, i need to stop the device going into standby mode period
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Click to collapse
other approach:
app that wakes up the device after a minute or so? the gps only disconnects for short time.

railto said:
the theory of having gps active while on standby is moot and now useless, i need to stop the device going into standby mode period
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Click to collapse
But that's solved already!
The keepAwake app posted earlier, music players keeping playing when pressing the off button, IM clients continue to run and receive messages after pressing the power button (implies both processor running and internet connection active)... in these cases, like any app that does the required system calls to disable standby while it's running, the device won't go to standby.
The only real problem you're facing is that GPS goes off when the power button is pressed, regardless of whether the rest of the device actually goes to standby or not (try running a GPS app while playing music, press power button, music still plays but GPS turns off).
Now we pointed some hints for you - you can try them (the reg edits for GPS apparently work in some cases but not all), but if they don't work then you're alone on that one, no solution is known. And tbh I've never seen any device on which you can disable the power off key, and it's obvious why...

Preventing Screen Locking when at Home or in Car?

Just getting used to my Moto X 2015 and can't quite figure out how to get it to behave the way I want...
I work at home, and would like my device to be quickly woken up and available without have to put in a PIN or pattern. Right now, I ended up enabling Smartlock (when paired to car bluetooth), and also home via location (for when I'm in the house); however, if I turn off location/GPS (to conserve battery), then smartlock doesn't work. So what has ended up happening is that with location off at home, if I tape the phone I get the lock screensaver. The only way I know to get back into the device is to hit the powerpoint, and which point it prompts me for my PIN.
If it were possible, I would like a way to tap (or otherwise gesture) to wake up the phone unlocked while either at home or in the car. How would I do that? Do I need to NFC to make this work (have never used it on any phone yet).
Any help is appreciated.

Why would you need to save battery when you are at home?

The way Android uses Location nowadays, unless you have some rogue app constantly pinging your location, "disabling" it doesn't really save an appreciable amount of battery. Leave location services on for a day or two and see if it drains your battery, I'd be willing to bet it won't.

Getting your unit to easily connect to a hotspot?

I'm currently using the Pumpkin 8.0 unit and I really like it - however, the process of when I get in my truck is not nearly as simple as I would like it to be and usually involves several minutes of having to stop-start personal hotspot on my iphone (or unlock the screen) and then often opening the wifi settings, sometimes seeing an authorization error that clears up on the next attempt. It's never the same process, seems like there are several things that happen different to get in the way of it just happening.
I have an iPhone 8 Plus I dont use very often that I was just keeping in there with Personal Hotspot turned on, which seems to stay on for a day without turning off. But I usually have to unlock it to get it to show up in the wifi section. Should I disable the lock, would that make a difference? What about using my Galaxy S7, would that be "easier", I havent really tired messing with it yet since that is my main phone.
What hotspot solutions do people use in their setups to avoid the "process" of getting online?

Assuming Android would be much easier. The quickest way I can turn it on off is with bixby with note 8.
Since I'm not rooted I couldn't get Tasker to automate it. I tried nfc tags also. Eventually bixby was my solution.
I'll follow the thread for other recommendations

I also tried NFC tag, but for some reason cellular data can not be switched ON by NFC soft on non-rooted phone (it's OK with WiFi hotspot) - keeping this down during day helps to save battery.

I tried the NFC tag and while I dont turn off cellular data, I was disappointed to learn from the developer that the API to turn on and off hotspots was removed by Google and is not supported in 3rd party apps. I put the quick setting in my drop down notification screen, so at least I can turn it on and off easily. I'm going to try the android phone for a couple days and see if its just another reason for me to dislike apple.

So I have noticed that this is only an issue after the device wakes from sleep via the fast boot. If you reboot the head unit for real it connects first time with no issues.
It also seems happy to connect to real wifi networks without any issues. I don't have an android phone so have not been able to try that, but it would be good to know others findings. I'm not sure how the iPhone hot spot works but it must differ slightly to a normally wifi base station.