BlackBerry saves lost hiker -- lucky she had signal!

I wanted to document this one from today’s Telegraph. The poor lady in question got rather lost in foggy weather somewhere in the Lake District. Rescuers couldn’t work out where she was so they got creative:

Mr Blakey added: “We asked her to take a photograph of her surroundings on her phone and send it to us.

“We were really struggling to find her as she couldnt give a clear description of her location.”

“But as soon as we got the picture through, we were able to pinpoint exactly where she was and it didnt take us long to rescue her.”

The lady was lucky she was in an area with signal. Other options, of course, would have been to locate herself using Google Maps. Or the BlackBerry’s built in maps function. Or via a wide array of location monitoring services like SmrtGuard.

Indeed, SmrtGuard has a ‘follow me’ function that will track your location every X minutes. Highly useful if you’re going into a dodgy area or hiking.

Still, if you don’t have signal, GPS coordinates can be extracted from your phone’s GPS function — accessing them is usually the problem for your average normob (“normal mobile user”).

On a geeky note, some devices automatically include location coordinates in photos. That could be useful for emergency services. But for mountain rescue — who know the area — a photo probably works just as well.

If you’re going hiking, it might be worthwhile doing a ‘hike’ or ‘hiking’ search in your app store of choice and picking up a few useful apps before you depart.

Oh, and charge your phone!