Guardian

A small phone lying on a dark surface beside a SIM card and a tray tool

Guardian was an anti-theft system for Symbian Series 60 devices, and the most developed thing Symbian Toys ever published. Every time the phone was switched on, Guardian authenticated the inserted SIM card. If authentication failed, it sent a notification message to a telephone number set in advance.

Archive notice. Symbian Toys was an independent hobbyist software project for the Symbian Series 60 platform, which Nokia discontinued in 2013. These pages preserve the project's own documentation as it was published. The software is no longer distributed here, and no support was ever offered for it. Device and platform names appear for identification only; the project was never affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any device manufacturer.

Description

Beyond notification, the system offered remote control functions — among them deleting photographs, the phone book, text messages, video and audio data in the event that the handset was lost or stolen. Those functions are documented in full on the plugin reference page.

The archived page also carried an important operational note: none of the messages Guardian sent or received were surfaced to the user of the handset. No icons, no lights, no sounds, no vibration, nothing visible in the inbox, sent or outbox folders, and no entries left in the logs.

Features

SMS notification

Guardian automatically sent a notification about the SIM change containing additional information: the new user's telephone number, the GSM cell ID the handset was connected to, the country identifier and the current network.

AutoStart

Guardian ran automatically every time the phone was switched on. To be fully operative it needed only to be installed and configured.

AutoHiding — withdrawn

Earlier releases switched the program to an invisible mode when an unauthorised SIM was inserted, or when the phone was started with no SIM at all, so that the new user would not be aware an anti-theft system was present. This behaviour was removed at the request of a security vendor, to avoid the software being misused as a spying tool. The archived page recorded that withdrawal openly rather than quietly dropping the feature, and this archive keeps the record for the same reason.

Multilanguage

Guardian shipped as per-language builds. By the 2.1 release these covered English, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Dutch, Czech, Chinese, Arabic and Ukrainian.

Uninstall protection

The program did not appear in the list of installed applications, and removing it required a specific procedure reachable only from inside the program itself.

Hard reset protection

A hard reset restores a handset to its factory settings and removes installed software, which defeats most applications of this type. Guardian used a shadow copy mechanism which, the page claimed, survived a hard reset in about 90% of cases.

Low overhead

In ordinary day-to-day use with an authorised SIM, Guardian used no memory and did not run in the background. It started at power-on, checked the SIM, and if the SIM was authorised it simply exited.

SIM white list

Up to ten authorised SIM cards could be registered. Managing that list is covered in the configuration guide.

Compatibility

Guardian 2.x listed support for the Nokia 3230, 6260, 7610, 6600, 6620, 6630, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, N70 and N90; the Panasonic X700 and X800; the Samsung SGH-D720 and SGH-D730; and the Lenovo P930. Later builds, announced through the project's news column, extended the list considerably across the 3rd Edition generation.

Close-up of a hand holding a small phone against a blurred street background at dusk

Installation notes

Two notes were carried on the page and are preserved here. The previous version did not need to be uninstalled first — installing the new version updated the system correctly. And at the end of installation it was necessary to wait a few seconds before launching the program, otherwise the error message "File impossible to delete" would appear.

Guardian 3rd Edition

A 3rd Edition rewrite was announced in July 2007 and its beta programme closed that December, with a thousand testers selected from the applications received and public release planned for a separate site. The project news column tracks the announcements as they were made.

Historical context

Guardian belongs to a period before handset manufacturers and platform vendors built device-location and remote-wipe features into the operating system itself. Its identity model — tie the alarm to the SIM, tie the licence to the IMEI, and use SMS as the control channel because it was the only channel that worked without a data plan — is a good record of what was possible on a mid-2000s smartphone. The source was published in 2021 as the Guardian source repository. Common questions are answered on the Guardian FAQ.