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Review: Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Software Upgrade (3)

Review: Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Software Upgrade (3)

Find Your iPhone And Remote Wipe

MobileMe includes a new service designed to help if your iPhone is lost or stolen. The Find My iPhone service uses the device’s on-board GPS to locate the iPhone anywhere in the world. You access the service from a Web browser (not the browser on your iPhone, of course, because your iPhone is supposedly missing. That’s why you’re using Find My iPhone), and view the iPhone position on a map.

I was able to use Find My iPhone to locate the device within a few dozen yards. That’s still a lot of square footage to search, but at least it’ll tell you if you left the iPhone in your office in Milwaukee, or in the hotel on that business trip to Boston.

Find My iPhone can also help you find the iPhone once you’ve determined its location. It can send a command to your device to emit a loud, piercing tone for up to two minutes, to help you triangulate on the handset’s location. You can also set the iPhone to display a message on the main screen, even when it’s locked.

Find My iPhone doesn’t work if the iPhone is switched off, so it’s easy for thieves to thwart it. But it helps honest people do the right thing; you can set up Find Your iPhone to ask people who find your iPhone to contact you to return it.

And, if all else fails, you can use Remote Wipe to erase all data off your device, to prevent the data — if not the device itself — from falling into the wrong hands.

Find Your iPhone and Remote Wipe require the MobileMe service, which is priced starting at $99 per year. Find Your iPhone and Remote Wipe are only small parts of MobileMe; the service also enables wireless synching of documents, Safari bookmarks, calendars, and address book entries between the iPhone and Mac, or between multiple Macs, as well as providing Webmail, Web calendar access, photosharing and more.

I’ve found MobileMe to be a good investment, although it has a bad reputation because of earlier bugginess and unreliability. Until last year, MobileMe was known as .Me.

Find Your iPhone and Remote Wipe were a bit tricky to configure; the setup is buried on the iPhone Settings under “Mail, Contacts, Calendars.” From there you go to your e-mail account for MobileMe, and enable “Find My iPhone.” That just makes no sense, it needs to be more obvious, on the top level of the Settings screen.

Find Your iPhone makes searching for your iPhone fun. This is dangerous. I don’t need any incentive to lose my iPhone. I’m absent-minded enough already.

[Thanks: http://www.informationweek.com]

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