A few days ago, I received what appeared to be spam labeled “5 Things You Never Knew Your Cell Phone Could Do” in my mailbox. One of the paragraphs caught my eye:
Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call
someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. It saves someone from having to drive your keys to you.
Now one neat trick I knew is that if the car is just out of range of the remote, putting it under your chin while pressing the button will give the remote an extra boost, as your skull will act as an antenna and give you an extra few yards of slack.
Some web sites, such as snopes, insist that the email is a hoax, but after reading various comments from readers on the internet, such as this site, it seems that some people have done it successfully. It sounded like rubbish, as keyless entry remotes are radio transmitters, but cell phones pick up audio signal and transmits the signal to the cell tower. Even if somehow it carries the transmitter signal, the signal should have dissipated at the radio tower, I would think. Still, a search for “cell phone car remote unlock” in google will reveal quite a few user comments that say otherwise. Could it be that someone is really trying to expand the hoax by littering comments with success stories, or is there some truth to this matter?
So I did an experiment. I went to my garage at work, called my wife and asked her to press her remote next to her iPhone while I put my loaner G1 phone next to the door. Nothing. I tried putting the G1 on speakerphone. Nothing. Maybe our phones are too “smart”, but instead, a ghetto phone from last century with a black and white display is needed to execute this experiment? Maybe the optimum angle on the phone was not achieved during my experiment? Or just maybe the whole story is … bowel movement?
If you have attempted it, I’d like to hear your results. It really indeed be convenient to avoid a 1 hour journey just to fetch the spare remote!