I’m going to give you a quick look at an application everyone with a Windows smartphone should seriously consider. I’ve come to realize that I carry a heck of a lot of personal information on my PDA, stuff I would not want to share with most people, and certainly not something I’d want to hand over to a stranger.

Setting a password on my device is a bit of a pain, I’d have to enter it every time I turn it on (30 or 40 times a day) and without any biometric security I’d need to type it in each time.

So when I came across Sprite Terminator I went from trial to purchase in under 10 minutes.

Sprite Terminator runs in the background on your phone (Windows Mobile 5/6 standard or professional) and is controlled via SMS text messages. When you install Sprite Terminator, you provide it with a password, and the phone numbers of other phones you want to associate with. Those other phones are then able to send commands (with the password) to your phone and perform all kinds of tasks.

These commands are quite powerful, and will show why I’m so impressed.

• Query - Replies with the phone serial number, SIM card serial number and a list of the most recent calls
• Lock - Locks the phone
• Wipe - Wipes the phone memory AND any installed memory card
• Clear - Wipes any user data (programs remain intact)
• GPS - Replies with the current location of the phone from built-in GPS or a Bluetooth GPS module.

On my CDMA phone I don’t use a sim card, but GPS smartphones can also benefit from a SIM change alert feature that sends a text message to the partner phones to let you know your phone has received a new sim card. The program can even auto-lock when a new sim has been installed.

To be sure that the phone can’t receive commands from people who are not "authorized", you pick mobile phone numbers from your contacts database and add them as a partner phone. Those partners will of course need to know the password. The program also has an option to allow commands from any phone number, which I’d only advise doing if you have a sufficiently strong password.

Let’s say that you lost your phone; if you are sure it’s not in your back pocket or at home on the dresser, it could be in the back of a cab, or worse. You grab your wife’s phone (or call her and kindly ask her to send the message to your number) and pull up the GPS location and lock it, so nobody can start making phone calls to Angola and reading your email.

On my test phone I have GPS built in, when I send the command "spritecmd password gps" I get a text message back within 30 seconds with the precise location of my phone. The application also supports Bluetooth GPS modules, but I’m not convinced that is always going to be convenient; the chances of your phone and Bluetooth GPS module being stolen/lost at the same time are quite limited.

The SMS response with the phone location contains a URL which links to the Sprite Software website and shows the position in Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth.  

There are some things I’d suggest to the developers; one is a log file of all outgoing messages from the application, the other is a way to make the program completely hidden on the device (at the moment it shows up in the start menu).

Other than those 2 very minor issues the program is close to perfection.

Sprite Terminator is just $14.95 and is available from the Sprite Software web store.