July 6, 2010
By Donovan Jackson

While many of the advances made in the world of mobile technology are so fantastic that ten years ago, you would never have believed them, there remain claims out there that are just plain, well, stupid. Despite that, the Internet has a way of making people believe even the most ridiculous stories. S’true, I read it on email. Just think back to all the daft chain emails you’ve received over the years…sure, right now a promise purportedly from AOL and Microsoft to give you thousands of dollars for forwarding an email seems preposterous, but it wasn’t always like that.

Anyway, that AOL/Microsoft letter has today morphed into SMSs purporting to notify you that you’ve won thousands of Rands…thanks to Nokia. Those obviously come from ‘419’ scammers who have clearly moved with the times, from email to mobile. Even if the AOL scam may have seemed believable in 1999, a cellphone with a digital camera, broadband Internet connection, QWERTY keyboard, gigahertz-plus processor, gigabytes of memory and multitasking operating system certainly wasn’t.

But what of the urban legends? With cellphones such a ubiquitous part of our lives, you guessed it, there’s no shortage of them. Tackling the outrageous claims is not a task for everyone…nope, it’s a task for Nokia Ringaz.

Let’s start with the ‘cellphone unlocks car remotely’ story. It goes like this: You’ve locked your keys in the car or lost them. Your spare remote are far away, maybe at home or in the safe. No problem, your phone can transmit the signal from the ‘remote’ remote! All you do is get someone at home to call your cell from theirs, direct the spare remote at the phone while you point your phone at the car (ye-e-es, starting to sound ridiculous yet?) and magically the car opens. You have your keys now and ‘distance is no object’! What’s more, ‘I tried this myself and it works’. That link actually shows the method unlocking a car. No, you cannot believe anything/everything you see on YouTube either.

Except, ah, not really. Read more about why this won’t work.

Hopefully this day and age, we don’t fall for such nonsense. (Mind you, Jeremy Clarkson did that thing where you boost your car remote using your skull…on Top Gear, nogal…weird science, it’s out there. Somewhere. Just far enough away to keep us guessing…)