With iPhone 3.0, MobileMe customers can locate missing iPhones via GPS, and can remotely wipe their phone's data if need be.
With today’s high-tech smartphones, losing your cellphone is a lot more worrisome and stress-inducing that it was even 3 years ago. Today’s smartphones are essentially mini and portable computers that can store an amazing amount of data, from music and movies to family photos and personal emails. When you lose or misplace a cellphone, 2 thoughts reign supreme. 1) Where is my phone? and 2) What if a stranger is accessing all of my private information? Luckily for iPhone users, the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 update includes a feature called “Find my iPhone” that will hopefully ease a lot of the worry that typically comes along with a missing cellphone. Before delving into what “Find my iPhone” is capable of, I should clarify that it’s only available to MobileMe customers. In that regard, it’s technically a service as opposed to a feature that will be accessible for all iPhone users once 3.0 becomes available for download. Now that that little caveat is out of the way, here’s a rundown of the features Apple has built into the incredibly simple, yet unbelievably useful, “Find my iPhone” service. If you’re a MobileMe customer, and find yourself in the un-enviable position of not knowing where your iPhone is, you can simply log into your MobileMe account and determine the approximate location of your iPhone on a map via GPS. Moreover, you can even send a text to your iPhone with pertinent information about where and whom to return it if found, the hope being that an upstanding citizen haphazardly stumbled upon it and is looking to get it back to its rightful owner. Now that’s all well and good if you left your iPhone at a restaurant downtown, but what if you’ve misplaced your iPhone in your house and have no idea where it is? Well “Find my iPhone” has an answer for that as well. In that scenario, users can log into their MobileMe account and have their iPhone play an alert sound even if the phone in silent mode. This is a godsend for anyone who’s tried to un-successfully locate their silenced phone by calling it from another number. Now let’s say that your iPhone wasn’t lost, but was stolen. More often than not, your phone contains information that you wouldn’t want in the hands of a complete stranger. From photos of your kids to personal contact information, certain information is called ‘private’ for a reason. In that type of scenario, iPhone users finally have the ability to perform a remote wipe of their phone, effectively deleting all of the phone’s data – such as emails, contact info etc. Again, the remote wipe feature is only available for MobileMe customers, but it’s nice that Apple has finally implemented this feature as it’s already available on a number of other smartphones. Notably, if you perform a remote wipe of your iPhone but eventually get it back, you can easily restore your iPhone by simply hooking it back up to your computer and re-sycning all of your data.
