Nokia Locate Sensor has just made its debut at CES 2009. The brainchild of the folk over at the Nokia Research Center, Locate Sensor is a prototype service designed to help ensure you never lose anything. You simply attach a physical wireless location tag (see photo gallery) to stuff such as your keys or wallet, and if you drop anything or it gets nicked from your pocket the accompanying Nokia Locate Sensor app points you in the direction of the item and even tells you how far away it is.

That’s not all it can do. Read on for the full details and to see a photo gallery of it in action.
The tiny Locate Sensor tag - the little green gizmo pictured below - can be attached and modified to be fixed to any sort of item you can think of, and the phone app will support up to 100 items. The battery powered tag runs for up to 18 months, but if the tag is made bigger it could accommodate a bigger battery and longer life, and similarly vice versa.

If you drop something the phone application is designed to automatically alert you and help you hone in on the object within a distance of up to 100 metres. It transmits a simple signal, and doesn’t use GPS, so it can be used inside and isn’t a battery killer.

Another smart use for Nokia Locate Sensor is that it can be tweaked to work the opposite way round - so if you have a tag on your person you can set it so that if your phone is lost or goes further that say 3 metres from you, it immediately disables the handset and re-enables it when it reenters your close vicinity.

It’s such a simple idea, the app works brilliantly, and it’s definitely one of the smartest little gadgets to make an appearance at CES 2009.

There’s no official word if Nokia Locate Sensor will leave Nokia Research Center and become a real product, but from what we saw of it we reckon it would make an awesome addition to Nokia’s product line-up. We’ll keep you posted.

TBC | £TBC | Nokia