How To Locate Cell Phone Using a Free Cell Phone Tracker App

It's so EASY to find the location of a cell phone with any computer. In most cases it's COMPLETELY FREE! Today I'm going to teach you a little bit about how to locate cell phone from your computer or smartphone.

The days of only law enforcement agencies being able to use a cell phone locator service are in the past. It seems to many that being able to locate someone with their cell phone is likely to only be a special effect from the movies.

Remember the days when you would watch star trek on television and they could locate Captain Kirk on their "long range scanners" and "beam him up"? Well unfortunately we haven't evolved to the point that you can find out where you kids are when they are late for dinner and beam them home. Maybe someday though. I'm keeping my fingers crossed! Let me rephrase that statement. We can't do this unless they are carrying a cell phone with a cell phone locator application on it. We can easily locate them but we can't "beam them home" just yet.

The old way to locate cell phone was with a method called triangulation. When a cell phoned is turned on, it immediately begins to search for the nearest cell phone tower by broadcasting it's ESN (electronic serial number). When it has found a tower, the tower sends a signal back informing the phone of the tower ID number and the signal strength.

Cell phone towers have a certain radius in which they can communicate with a cell phone. This range is represented as a 360 degree circle around the tower. Step one to locate cell phone through triangulation is for the tower to calculate how far the phone is from the tower. It then calculates an imaginary circle that is sized based on the phones distance from the tower. This is circle "A".

Since there are several towers in any given area, the phone also knows how close it is to the surrounding towers. This is so that when you travel, the phone can automatically transfer it's signal to the next strongest tower to prevent dropped calls. The second nearest tower calculates the cell phones distance and again makes an imaginary circle based on the distance the phone is from the tower. This is circle "B".

The third step to locate cell phone through triangulation is for the next closest tower to gather the same data as the first two did. Once again an imaginary circle is recorded. This is circle "C".

A central computer located at the cell phone company knows the exact location of each of the towers reporting the proximity of the cell phone being tracked. A software program overlays circles a, b, and c. The point at which all three circles intersect is the location of the cell phone. It's as simple as that.

The technology of locating a cell phone with triangulation merely provides a close approximation of the location of the phone. It is usually accurate to within 100 meters or less. In most instances, this is level of accuracy is fine. There is a more accurate cell phone locator services that use GPS technology that is emerging as people replace their old phones with the new smart phones like the ever popular iPhone.

There are a couple of other services called Find My iPhone and iLocalis that are good cell phone tracking apps for the iPhone but you need to pay to use them.  Find My iPhone costs $99 a year and iLocalis will cost you $20 year.

Sprint has a very good cell phone locator service called the Sprint Family Locator.  It's not free either but it doesn't cost much money.  Sprint only charges you $5.00 a month to use their cell phone tracker and it is a very good tracking service.  As a matter of fact, it is the only cell phone tracking service that doesn't require you to download and install a cell phone tracking app on the phone that you want to be able to track.  It will work with any Sprint or Nextell cell phone and you don't need to subscribe to a data plan with your cell phone service provider if you want to use it either. 

Believe it or not, there are some free programs that you can download onto your smart phone that will allow you to be tracked and track others. All you have to do is install the app on a supported cell phone and then make some minor configuration settings and bingo, you can begin tracking.

These free services are quite accurate and easy to use. Imagine looking at your phone and instantly seeing if any of your friends are near you during lunch time. You never know, you might find that a friend is only a block away from you. Then you can call him or her up and ask them if they want to get together for lunch.

You can set these free cell phone tracking programs up on your child's cell phone. Then whenever you want to check on them, you can simply look at your phone and see exactly where they are any time day or night.

Imagine that you expect your wife home from work at 7:00 PM and there was a big snow storm and she's late. If you have a cell phone tracker installed on her phone, you can easily check to see if she has left the office yet.

The uses for this technology are virtually endless and someday soon nearly everyone will have this feature on their cell phones. It's just to important of a feature to not make it available to everyone who wants it.

The most popular free cell phone locator apps are listed here:

• Google Latitude
• Glympse
• MobiWee

You should know that there are a couple of limitations that cell phone tracker apps have.  Keep these in mind when using them.

Limitations:

1. The phone must be turned on.  It's not possible for the apps to turn the phone on remotely.
2. The phone must be in a cell phone service coverage area
3. The phone must have a cell phone signal.
4. They apps use the GPS receiver that is built into them that they won't work very well if you're in a shielded building like a parking garage.
5. The app needs to be running on the phone or they won't work.
   

Some people email me from time to time wanting to know what cell phone tracker app they should use. They always want to know which app is the best. Unfortunately it's not always easy to answer that question. There are several factors that come into play when choosing an app for tracking mobile phones.

The first factor is the type of phone your have. If you have one of those old flip phones that don't allow you to download and install apps, you're just going to be out of luck in most cases. These phones are like the old "brick phones" that you used to see people carrying around in their back pockets. They're not really good for much other than making a phone call.

If you have a smartphone, then you have a lot of aps to chose from. Some are free and some require a fee. My favorite is covert phone tracker app by the name of SpyBubble. The reason I like it so much is that it's much more powerful that many of the other apps you can choose from.

It's actually one of the only apps of it's kind that is nearly impossible to detect once it has successfully been installed on a smartphone. You can learn more about this powerful cell phone tracking app by clicking on the link below.

Here's a good video from Google describing their free cell phone locator service called Google Latitude.

You shouldn't use a cell phone tracking application to track someone without their knowledge and permission unless you have first checked the local laws where you live to make sure that this isn't against the law. 

You and you alone are responsible for your actions.  The information contained herein is for entertainment purposes only.