About stolen phones and a sort of happy ending

It stinks to lose a phone. Here’s Suw Charman’s story of the loss of her trusty E61. Suw is well known in the tech world.

Link [from Ewan]: Chocolate and Vodka :: Just had my phone stolen

But, to cap it all, I was just starting to really love that phone. 19 days is just enough to start to get used to the way a new OS and a new phone works. I liked the shortcuts that made using the phone simple, I liked the Symbian OS which allows you to run more than one process at a time (in stark contrast to Palm, which has to fake it), I liked the form of the E61, it’s QWERTY keyboard and its nice, bright screen. More than anything, I loved having Google Maps on it, and Google Mail. I adored the web browser which made surfing the net on a phone actually doable. I was totally in love with the wifi.

Alas, she had insurance, so it turned out OK. She got a new phone, but there was a mess up with transferring her phone number. Also, she’s made no comment on the data and such.

We’ve all been in this business for so long and know that small mobile devices are lost and stolen in droves. And the market has the right solution out there, so that’s not so bad. I am just wondering why there are not better solutions than plain insurance – where’s the data backup, the data transfer, the clear understanding of what to do (she guessed and hoped and lucked out)?

Yup. A biz opportunity that has been left on the table for a long time. And I think many of the ideas I have heard in this space are not thinking the right way.