There should be a guest-mode in Phones – Entertainment News

There should be a guest-mode in Phones – Entertainment News

Almost all of us come across this weird and highly annoying question, “Hey, can I see your phone real quick?” and your facial expressions change right away.

Oh, snap. What tabs did you leave open inbox? Did you delete those messages (from someone special..nthe private messages)?. The recent theme  that you totally-installed-just-to-test- the resolution of your screen-seriously-shut-up…
is it still there?

Quick, hand it over before you temper their curiosity! Or say “no” and be the weirdo who wouldn’t hand their phone over to a friend for a second. If only there were some sort of on-the-fly middle ground — a “Guest Mode”, if you will. Yeah there’s a dire
need to introduce a new guest-mode to save people from such alien attacks.

As smart-phones march toward ubiquity, so does the trend of passing them around between friends. Meanwhile, we cram (and then forget all about) more and more private junk into our phones each and every day. All the photos? All the voicemails? All the the
still-logged-in social network accounts? I don’t even keep anything remotely salacious on my phone, and I’m still terrified that I’m handing over album after album of booty pictures I never even actually took anytime I pass off my phone.

Here’s the dream: one lock-screen, two PINs. One for me, one for anyone else who might use  phone but doesn’t necessarily need to see
everything.

You see, I don’t mind if my friends want to challenge my ridiculous Fruit Ninja skills. They want to boot up Google Maps and be the Chewbacca (read: co-pilot) to my Millenium Falcon (read: Honda)? Great. They need to look something up and their 90?s brick
phone can’t handle such techno-voodoo? Here, use mine! I trust them not to run off with my phone — they are my friends, after all.

That doesn’t mean I want them to be a tap or two away from everything.

Thus, the two PINs. Punch in your private PIN, your phone unlocks as normal. Punch in the guest PIN, it hides anything that prying eyes may sneak (or accidentally stumble) into. Your browsing history gets hidden, and all but a hand-picked, whitelisted set
of apps completely disappear. Unlike a simple one-tap “Guest Mode” button, however, people you don’t want using your phone at all (like, say, dirty, dirty phone thieves) still can’t.

Things of a distantly similar vein have been built for Android — those I’ve seen, however, are all simply single-purpose apps (like games or activities for kids) that can’t be exited without a password. I’ve yet to see anything implemented system-wide. Why?
Get on it, Apple. Or Google. Or Microsoft. Hell, everyone do it.

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Posted by Irfan Khokhar on Jan 6 2012. Filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry