First this: ~~~ It's amazing for those of us who never thought of it before now . This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a mobile phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are home, call someone on your mobile. Hold your mobile about a foot from your car door and have the other person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the boot). Editor's Note: *It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a mobile phone!" ~~~ However... Not so funny.... I once pulled into a carpark and when I locked my car the doors of the car next to mine unlocked. But they wouldn't lock again. It wasn't the same brand of car as mine either. I'm researching the mobile remote idea. I know that with the Advanced RAM GSM car alarm system it will send an SMS message to up to 5 mobile phones if the alarm goes off, and you can SMS with your PIN number back to the car to enable/disable the alarm and lock/unlock the doors. If you have a remote car tracking system it can also be done. EziTrakTM utilises GPS and GSM technology to give the car owner instant tampering notification, control, tracking and emergency alert information over the phone. You can also call EziTrak with your PIN number and ask them to unlock your car. Perhaps this was the source of the idea. I can't see any way the unlock button on a normal phone could do it. Sounds like an urban myth. To quote http://www.urbanlegends.about.com: "Your remote car key operates by sending a weak, encrypted radio signal to a receiver inside the automobile, which in turn activates the door locks. "Since the system works on radio waves, not sound, the only conceivable way a signal from your spare remote could be picked up by one cell phone and relayed to your car's onboard receiver by another would be if both phones were capable of sending and receiving at exactly the same frequency as the remote itself - which they can't be, given that all remote entry devices operate at frequencies between 300 and 500 MHz, while all mobile phones, by law, operate at 800 MHz and higher. "It's apples vs. oranges, in other words. Your cell phone can no more transmit the type of signal needed to unlock a car door than your remote key is capable of dialing up your Aunt Mary ... though no one can predict what miracles the future may bring. " But with a phone and SMS decoder as part of the car system anything could be controlled. Reminds me of the guy who had a Stanley Steamer. These took a while to get the steam up, so he used to leave it in gear and walk off down the road. When he knew it was about to start rolling he would turn around and whistle and the car would roll up to him. This greatly impressed the locals who had not seen many of these new-fangled horseless carriages before. Then this: It's false...
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