GadgetTrak: Finding Your iPhone and Your iPhone Thief

If you’re the type of victim who loves retribution, here’s an iPhone app that would probably give you happy jitters once you see just who your enemy is. Imagine the dooms day when your iPhone got lost. In this world of movie-like crime and chaos, the only thing you can think of to find your ‘missing’ (or stolen) iPhone is to put a tracking device on it so you can catch the reckless thief. But then again, there’s always an app for that! You can try GadgetTrak.

What makes GadgetTrak different from all other iPhone tracking apps, as I have tested, is that it optimizes my iPhone’s camera to get a photo of the person who is about to sell my iPhone 4 for cash. A sleuthing, Nancy-Drew-loving kid would so love this! But is it worth your every penny (because this ain’t a free app, I tell you)? Read on to find out.

GadgetTrak: The Pros

I can only think of one great thing that sets the GadgetTrak apart from other iPhone tracker apps (like Find My iPhone and iHound). This is its ability to use your front and rear camera to see who has your iPhone or where it might be in the world. They call this Camera Report and you can access it for a dollar. So does it work well? Not surprisingly, it does! See the photo in this article? That is an actual photo of a thief who planned to sell iPhone for cash up until the police got him. To get the best view of your iPhone stealer, all you have to do is to send a push notification to your iPhone. Whoever has your iPhone will automatically receive the message and will (in his extreme panic and moment of guilt) be tracked if he dismisses the notification (which is smartly masked as a meeting reminder). You can also set a minute interval for your notifications so you can see your iPhone moving from place to place every minute (so you can see just where your thief is going). It has also been proven to be an accurate location tracker for nearby places.

GadgetTrak: The Cons

What’s disappointing about GadgetTrak, however, is that we’ve only proved its accuracy for nearby places. It accurately detected and located my iPhone in a nearby park (about two blocks away from me) and in another neighborhood. However, it didn’t prove accurate when I had my iPhone placed in a parking lot while I was at home as it located my iPhone at a nearby highway. And while it is reasonably priced at $3.99, the fact that it charges a dollar per Camera Report would make it more expensive to use than other apps. As compared to Apple’s own Find My iPhone app which is free online, GadgetTrak is harder to maintain. I mean, a dollar per report? What if you end up with a black photo because the thief decided to put it in a bag or a box to sell your iPhone? What nailed it as a not-much-of-an-app though is that the tracking speed it offers is so slow, you’d have lost the thief waiting for it to generate a location.