Smartphone makers are pushed by American officials to come up with a mechanism which will ideally make smartphones useless and just a piece of plastic if it is stolen.
Move is aimed at discouraging the smartphone theft and making it almost useless to steal a smartphone.
Officials driving the campaign have met Samsung, Apple and Microsoft – who account for 90 percent of smartphone market share – to convince them for adding a kill switch in smartphones, trigging which should disable the smartphone for any use in any case.
Ideally, if kill switch is activated, the smartphone will become a paperweight with not performing any functionality in any case. The mechanism on how this kill switch should get activated is still being argued and is likely to meet a consensus after deliberation.
If such a mechanism is worked out and put in practice, this will help Asian and especially South Asian markets to a greater extent. Since these regions are heavily burdened with phone theft cases and especially when smartphones are too expensive compared with usual commodities, such a kill switch can add further value for the consumers.
Via WSJ
its not in favor of smart phone makers. Stealing results in sale. If your phone was stolen and you buy another one. You actually havent bought a it for yourself. You bought it for the thief.
I dont think, they’ll agree add a kill switch. However, will never admit the fact :)
Your opinion?
Yep, that’s one way of looking at it. :)
Adding a kill switch still won’t stop that user from buying a phone.
next, an announcement by mqm for a wheel jam strike in karachi for motorcyle riders on the day it is actually implemented.
Karachi k chooron ki roti rozi marnay k kyun pechay ho?????????????
Well that’s to good thanks
Many reasons this won’t work if the thief has a personal computer. Not to mention you will be able to get it un”kill”ed or at least make it un”kill”able before the victim reports it, from local mobile shops.
When looking at this scenario ideally, it sounds like a must-have feature especially in Asian market. But people (thieves) have always been smarter – they would find a solution to unkill smartphone anyway making all this debate utterly useless.
that’s good for US & Europe but local market champions can make it useless :( mobile steal can be controlled if increase the efficiency of CID police,
What is the source and authenticity of this news
Who has got time to press a ‘kill switch’ while some one is holding a gun to your head?
Already there are smart phones which let you remotely wipe off your data in case phone get stolen,maybe they should add this feature as ‘remote kill switch’ so that remotely theft victim can trigger the kill switch and make the hardware useless for the thief.
If the phone is gps enabled then it should turn into a homing device which should allow law enforcement authorities to catch the mobile snatcher.(again some smart phones(Iphone etc) already have this option.)
It can be activated as soon as you get to a computer with an internet connection. Use your imagination.
Smart phone theft is much more is USA, UK and other foreign countries even than South Asia. Have some research before writing the words
Show me the numbers you found.