The #1 target of thieves has become your cell phone. Today's phones are hot because of both their intrinsic value and the sensitive financial info on them.

We're at a point today where 50% of all face-to-face crime around the nation involves stealing your cell phone. In New York City,  theft of iPads and iPhones represent 1 out of every 7 crimes. 

But cell phone theft accounts for 1 in 3 robberies even in an auto-dependent city like Los Angeles. Criminals are smashing car windows there to grab smart phones.

That's why it's important to put safeguards in place on your phone that could help you track down a stolen phone or even take a picture of the criminal to help the police track him or her down.

I recently read a story in The New York Times  about a woman who downloaded an app called iGotYa to her iPhone that takes a picture and e-mail it if an incorrect password is used to unlock the phone.  The woman was able to give the picture of the alleged thief to police as they tracked him down. (iGotYa is available online, but not through the official App Store. It is, however, available through Cydia, which is a third party app marketplace.)

While that story had a happy ending, a lot of similar stories don't. The problem is the cell phone carriers and manufacturers don't have an economic incentive to help the police prevent these crimes in the first place.

Once a smartphone is stolen, criminals have it wiped for $30 per device in about 30 minutes time. They get the electronic serial number (ESN) wiped off so it won't show off up in stolen databases.

A stolen iPhone 5 can be resold for $400 to $500 with a clean ESN. So you pay $30 to have it wiped and then it clears $400. What a business!

The industry has no incentive to fix the problem. Because the victim has to go buy another unit at a full unsubsidized price. Will it take people being murdered for their smartphones for the industry to do something?

If you're an Android person, it's very easy to lock and track your phone. But for Apple, the FindMyiPhone app is now being routinely circumvented by criminals. We need more effort from Apple to make it tougher for stolen phones to become untraceable. Surely the company doesn't want blood on its hands if a crime turns violent when somebody wants to steal their iPhone or iPad.

Meanwhile, the movement toward non-contract plans continues. Now even AT&T is getting into the marketspace with their own non-contract sub-brand called All in One.

They'll offer a $35 a month plan with unlimited talk and text for feature phones, and $50 a month for unlimited talk, text and 2GB of data for $50.