Ghost Pigeon masks your supersecret identity

(Credit: Crave UK)

During the day, we're mild-mannered tech bloggers, wearing glasses and looking moody in our vast, yet innocuous, Crave penthouse. But at night, we fight crime. We take on the persona of a creature of the night--black, terrible, shadowy. We become the Ghost Pigeon.

To protect our loved ones, we have to keep our secret identity super-duper seekrit. That means hiding our calls and texts to the police commissioner, especially when we send him MMS messages with videos of us collaring a miscreant.

Luckily, just for people like us there's Sonaworks' Ghost Pigeon software, a secret-phone-within-a-phone that will hide your texts, MMS messages, and calls. It's available now in the U.K. and a bunch of other countries, including Estonia, Bulgaria, Norway, Nigeria, and Cyprus, but apparently it hasn't made its way to the U.S. yet.

Ghost Pigeon is invisible on the phone--there's no icon in the menu. Instead, you launch the application by typing in a password. Here at Crave UK, we installed Ghost Pigeon on our 8GB Nokia N95, and although it's visible in the list of installed apps, its name is well disguised.

We could hide contacts, so that we only saw them from within Ghost Pigeon, not in our normal list of contacts. The phone rang normally for incoming calls from hidden --or "pigeonated"--contacts, but they were only stored in Ghost Pigeon's call logs and weren't visible in the normal call log.

Similarly, our phone alerted us to incoming texts from a hidden contact, but the texts didn't show up in our normal in-box, only in the Ghost Pigeon in-box.

You can also make images and video and music files secret, which removes the link in the phone's standard media player or media storage folder. The file isn't moved from the folder, but you can't access it from the phone's normal user interface.

If you're not a superhero, Ghost Pigeon could also be useful for hiding stuff from your other half... like an exciting birthday surprise! Or another secret family, for example.

Ghost Pigeon costs 10 pounds (about $16) and is available for most Nokia N-series phones, with more Symbian handsets on the way. Check out the Ghost Pigeon Web site for compatible handsets, as well as more countries outside the U.K. where the app is available.

(Source: Crave UK)