Instant personalization and temporary ownership of handheld devices

As we increasingly depend on inexpensive handheld devices at work and in daily living, ensuring the accessibility of those devices and the availability of the personalized services they provide becomes a major challenge. In this paper, we present a system for instant personalization and temporary ownership of mobile devices that addresses these issues. The system enables the user to make the transition from requiring a specific individual device to utilizing any device at hand. This significantly raises the degree of redundancy of devices accessible to the user from one to a potentially unlimited number of devices of a certain type. The system that we have prototypically implemented further provides support for periodic data backup, data recovery, and data confidentiality when devices are lost or stolen.