Rival cellular smartphone makers Apple and Samsung have responded to clamors to create anti-theft features on their products. Top prosecutors from the U.S.' San Francisco and New York City states said law and security enforcement officers will now road test the efficiency of the new safety elements of the smartphones.

U.S. state and federal security experts will specifically test Apple's iPhone 5 with its activation lock and Samsung's Galaxy s4 with Lojack for Android by removing and changing SIM cards placed inside the smartphones. Using software to jailbreak the gadgets, security experts want to see if the anti-theft features will be bypassed to restore the phones back to their original factory settings.

"We will assess the solutions they are proposing and see if they stand up to the tactics commonly employed by thieves," San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a joint statement.

"We are working to ensure that the industry imbed persistent technology that is effective, ubiquitous and free to consumers in every smartphone introduced to the market by next year," both gentlemen added.

Apple and Samsung came up with the anti-theft features in response to clamor from the prosecutors' office to create a kill switch in their smartphones in order to curb the rising incidences of violent smartphone theft, known as Applepicking, in the states of San Francisco and New York City.

The San Francisco district attorney and New York's attorney general even called for a Smartphone summit in June to lobby for the request.

'Applepicking' meant to describe the growing violent street crimes involving smartphone theft. After stealing the phones, the thieves wipe clean the devices' memories and then resell them on the secondary market for hundreds of dollars.

Apple, in June, said the Activation Lock for iOS7, its new mobile operating system, will require a thief to enter a password first before he can reactivate a stolen iPhone.

Samsung's "LoJack" new anti-theft feature in the Galaxy S4, meantime, although it will allow theft victims to delete data from the device, will however "stop it from ever rebooting if stolen."

Based on NYPD records, 11,447 iOS devices were stolen in the Big Apple alone from January to September in 2012, a growth of 40 per cent over the same period in 2011. In San Francisco, smartphone thefts account for nearly half of all robberies.