While on a news job yesterday I thought I would test out the new iPhone os3.0’s “Find my iPhone” feature. It’s a simple as this…
Find my iPhone.
It’s human to misplace things, even your iPhone. The good news is that if you do lose your iPhone, MobileMe can help you find it. Simply enable the Find My iPhone feature in MobileMe settings on your iPhone.* Then anytime it goes missing, log in to me.com from any computer and use Find My iPhone to show its approximate location on a map, play a sound to help you find it yourself or display a message on the iPhone screen to help someone else return it to you.
Remote Wipe.
If you’re concerned that your iPhone won’t make its way back to you, you can initiate a remote wipe at me.com.* This restores your iPhone to its factory settings, ensuring that your personal information is nobody’s business but your own. And if you eventually find your iPhone, you can restore your email, contacts and calendars by enabling your MobileMe account on your iPhone. Or connect your iPhone to your computer and use iTunes to restore the data from your most recent iPhone backup.
So seeing as though I have the relevant MobileMe subscription I thought I’d give it a try. I had 10 mins of free time while I was working on a ‘death by taser’ story [link] in a small township south of where I live.
Here’s a gv of the scene taken with my iPhone
The scene on the corner of Smith & Green streets, Brandon
I then sat my iPhone on the roof of my car and fired up the MobileMe site on my MacBook and went to ‘Find my iPhone’. Here’s where it was located.
Accurate to about a metre or two according to that map! So then it was time to send the phone a message and an annoying sound. Typed this into the MobileMe ‘Find my iPhone’ page
And then only seconds later the phone started beeping and displaying…
Very, very cool…
I didn’t try out the remote wipe but from all accounts it works perfectly. Simply click Remote Wipe and then follow the prompts for near instant permanent wiping of all data from your phone. If you then find your phone you can easily restore it from your last sync backup (you do have your phone automatically backing up don’t you?).
#1 by Darren at June 15th, 2009
I’d love the camera to automatically take a photo if it detected iphone movement when the message was sent through, then post it to you on me.com. The look on someones face when they get a message saying you know where they are would be priceless. You could also evaluate how big a posy you’d need to take over to collect the phone.
#2 by Cameron at June 16th, 2009
Nice idea! I have a package like that on my MacBook that takes a photo with the camera and also takes screengrabs and posts the photos and screengrabs to you, along with ip addresses, location and more. Have a look at http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/mac/
#3 by Barbara at June 30th, 2009
Not so accurate where I am