Most people with smartphones have them packed with apps that they've accumulated over time. Whether it was that flashlight you needed to find your car keys or that game you friend told you was great. Today I was reminded of how useful an app could be. A friend of mine visited the store a few weeks ago and puchased a Casio Commando from me. He works construction and needed a tough phone, but wanted to have an Android device to stay in touch. Little did he know how handy it would turn out to be.

Fast forward a few weeks to today when he showed up in more store. He had been at work and left his phone sitting on top of the tire of his dump truck. When he drove off to his next job his phone fell under the truck and was left in the dust. Before making an insurance claim, I suggested that we try firing up the Android Market and downloading an app I had played with recently, AndroidLost. AndroidLost is a small app that lets you remotely control your phone, enable the GPS and locate your phone, take a picture with your camera, set off an alarm and bunch of other things. We logged into the market, pushed the app out to his phone and within minutes we had a map up that showed his phone's location and set off an alarm to alert the guy that found it to the fact we were on to him.

Once the alarm had sounded a few times, he must have realized something was wrong so he answered the phone (which he had not been doing up to that point). He told us where he was, to which I responded, "I know". We arranged to meet up, and my buddy recovered his phone.

So would life have been over if we hadn't recovered the phone? Probably not, but it saved him from having to look for a new one, or file an insurance claim. In my opinion, AndroidLost is without a doubt the best security app in the Android Market, and you would be wise to download it now.

Click here or scan this barcode to download.