Ping Drop : Don't Lose Your Phone

       I was aware of a couple pings such as ping pong and pinging in League of Legends, but I was not familiar with Ping Drop. That's because it's a new kind of ping. Designed for smartphones, it uses your phones accelerometer to sense when you drop your phone to help prevent you from losing your phone. Once triggered by a drop, it will  alert you that you have dropped your smartphone. What it does at this time depends on your settings. 

What Can it do?
     As the screenshot on the right displays, you can turn on and off a ringtone. You can also set the ringtone you want for the app including your own songs, mp3s, and stock ringtones available on your phone. Next you can also change the volume of the ringtone. Two other nice touches are the camera flash to add a little flare to get your attention, and an accelerometer sensitivity setting. 

Suggestions and my experience:  
     Being able to change the ringtone and volume used for the app is relieving because the default ringtone can be a bit annoying after a while. Then again, that can be used as a deterrent and get you to avoid mistreating your precious smartphone in the first place(even minor bangs) and/or get your attention the way an alarm does.  Having the app use the camera flash was unexpected, but welcomed. Having the option to toggle that off is even better as the flash an consume quite a bit of battery life. My phones lowest  accelerometer sensitivity was still high in my opinion. Now the biggest flaw with the smartphone app is that for my phone, it doesn't activate while in sleep mode /standby mode. I'm usually aware of my phone when its not in sleep mode. So enabling the app during sleep mode would be a big step for this app. Another step would be to even lower the current lowest sensitivity setting. I have only tested the app on my Sony Xperia Play so I cannot say whether or not these are device specific issues.

The provided screensave is pretty much all the user interface involved. It's clean and smooth and simple to use. It's easy to set up and be on your way. First start by downloading the app from Google Play here for Android devices. It costs 99 cents, but compare that to losing your Android smartphone ranging from $100-$500 and having to deal with insurance claims or missing important text messages and calls. Save yourself from future headaches by taking precautions.


Thanks for reading.