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Signal Strength
Written by Mike Sharsky
In June, Apple began offering a new service that lets you find a lost iPhone by looking it up on a Web site. That option wasn’t available to a Seattle family last year, so when Cathia Geller lost her iPhone, husband David Geller and their daughter climbed into Cathia’s minivan to search for the phone the old fashioned way – by driving toward the phone’s last known location and searching on foot.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the rescue: Bluetooth technology saved the day.
The phone was believed lost near the ferry landing in downtown Seattle, but Cathia suggested that David first rendezvous with her at a friend’s house in Bellevue, Wash. – which astute readers will recognize as the official home of the Bluetooth SIG.
As he drove to meet his wife, David noticed the family’s Toyota Sienna signaling contact with the lost iPhone, which Cathia had previously paired with the vehicle’s onboard Bluetooth wireless system. The acquisition signal disappeared, then reappeared as the vehicle moved.
On a hunch, David began navigating around the area in which the signal appeared. With a bit of creative triangulation, he and his daughter stopped at the place where the signal was the strongest. Sure enough, they found the missing phone.
“We were really excited,” David says of the Bluetooth enabled search and rescue. “It was just a fun process. We were on our way to downtown Seattle and it turned out to be somewhere completely different.”
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