GadgetTrak Review Boston Globe - “Software helps you track your gadgets”
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Perhaps the worst thing about portable devices is that they’re so easy to carry around, we can barely hang on to them. Asurion, a Kansas City company that insures portable devices, says Americans lose about 60 million cellphones every year. Our laptop computers don’t fare much better. A 2008 study by Ponemon Institute LLC, a research outfit in Traverse City, Mich., calculated that every week, 12,000 laptops are lost or stolen in the nation’s airports alone.
Luckily, some gadgets are smart enough to call for help. A Portland, Ore., company called GadgetTrak has created some smart software to help them do it.
I tested two of their products. One was PC-Trak, for hunting down lost or stolen Windows laptops, which costs $25 a year. There’s also a version for Apple Macintosh laptops, which I didn’t try. The other was GadgetTrak for BlackBerry smartphones, which sells for a one-time price of $25. It is also available for phones that use Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software, but it’s not yet offered for Google Android phones. There’s a free version for Apple’s iPhone, but it lacks some advanced features. Apple famously prevents iPhone applications from running constantly in the background, a limitation that cripples GadgetTrak on the iPhone.
