I've been a numpty and misplaced my mobile. I know I had it at work on Monday but it wasn't in my bag when I got home so it's either in the office somewhere or it fell out of my bag whilst riding home (to make things even more hilarious I think it's still in silent mode, so simply calling it isn't much help…. sigh….)

A quick Google reveals there are many sites offering mobile phone tracking, some with 30 day free trials. Anyone used them/can recommend one? Ideally the free-er the better (if that makes sense) as I only want to do this once and don't really want the faff of registering, filling in credit card details and then cancelling the account.

Ta in advance.

Unless your phone has GPS activated and still has battery life left then youve had it Im afraid

Youve probably also had it even if the above is true as you would probably need to activate it from the phone

I have an HTC hero with GPS
On Google latitude its amazing to see where it is (I am) on Google maps

If I turn off the GPS I can still track myself on Googe Latitude but only to the nearest cell or phone mast
I am currently about 1km from my actual position according to Google – which may be useful 🙂

So the best you could do – if these things work – would be to within a KM or so

Sorry

Hmmm – has got some battery left, so that's good – one did say that even -f the battery is dead it will provide a 'last known' position, which would be good enough. None of the sites I looked at said it needed GPS enabled, but I'll go back and check. Ta.

Actually you can get pretty accurate tracking without GPS, but all these services will require you to accept the service via a text message to the phone – otherwise you could use them to secretly track anyone (like the government does 😯 ).

but all these services will require you to accept the service via a text message to the phone

Yes, that could be more of a problem….. ****.

Thinking laterally then…. any "spooks" on here care to do a phone track for me? PM me for the number 😉

Just report yourself to GCHQ and watch for the anti-terror police to show up?

the Russians (and Israelis, I believe) have both carried out assisantions by targetting missiles on mobile phone signals.

Do make sure it isn't in your desk drawer first though.

I know a couple of people at GCHQ – one is '..currently out of the country…', the other isn't really high enough up the food chain to be useful. Pfft – call themselves bloody friends, eh 😉

Can't believe no-one has posted that "comedy" phone tracking link yet 😆

Can't believe no-one has posted that "comedy" phone tracking link yet

I was going to but it's not working at the mo

I've been waiting for it – allthepies wins for an honourable first-mention!

I've used Google Latitude – with mixed success, it often gives huge errors because the system will frequently report to on-line viewers the cell mast location of the phone, even when it's simultaneously reporting to the user the correct GPS location, and the phone had good GPS and GPRS coverage. The problem occurs at random, but frequently in my experience.

I've also tried Phonelocator (free)
Trackr! (free, but didn't work very well for me)

I have semi-used Google Latitude to recover my phone which I lost on a mountain in France. It would have been rather more useful if the phone had reported it's real location rather than a KM away (A frequent and annoying weakness in the system as noted above). But it was good enough for me to establish that it hadn't been taken away by anyone else, so I went back up and found it the next day.

found it

http://www.trackapartner.com/

warning not sure if its worksafe