Sony is piloting its remote security service for Xperia smartphones, called ‘my Xperia’, in the Nordics this week before a full global release in the second quarter of 2013.
Sony Mobile announced the roll out on its official blog through a brief interview with Marcin Zielinski, a Sony Experience Planner and “one of the brains-behind-the-app”.
Zielinski said that to begin with, the phased launch will only affect Xperia smartphones released in 2012 and running Ice Cream Sandwich. The Xperia Acro S will receive the update first, with new devices joining the list “over the coming weeks”.
Users won’t be able to sign up to the new service manually though; Sony says Xperia smartphone owners will need to wait until a notification appears on their device, explaining that the app is now available to download via Update Center.
The service itself echoes the Find My iPhone app that comes pre-installed on every Apple smartphone. Users activate the app in the Xperia smartphone’s settings, and use a Google ID to sign in to myexperia.sonymobile.com to access the main dashboard.
If you happen to lose your device, you can then use the website to locate it on a map, sound an alert to get someone’s attention – which will also override silent mode and wake the display – and lock the phone to keep all of your personal information private.
It’s also possible to erase both internal and external SD card information if you’re worried about any confidential data being read or manipulated.
Sony says that before they launch ‘my Xperia’ elsewhere, they’re keen to receive suggestions, questions and feedback via their support forum. It follows an update to Find My iPhone last month, which added the ability to get driving directions to your iPhone, iPad or Mac’s location if you’re running it on an iOS 6 device.
Image Credit: PSD/ Flickr
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