Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"iPhone owners (who also use MobileMe) were excited to hear that the two products could combine to help you find, recover, or remotely erase your iPhone if it was lost or stolen. Now there's one man's story of actually using it to recover his precious iPhone."

One of the most interesting aspects of this saga for me is the fact that Lego has a convention! Who knew?! I kid of course, the story is interesting for another aspect; the location feature of MobileMe worked pretty well for this guy. He details the complete recon mission on his blog, but suffice to say, he got his iPhone back. Not sure I'd recommend this for the average citizen (based on the numerous assault calls and disturbance calls I've dispatched when someone confronts the thief and the thief fights back), but it is nice when the good guys win.

"Apple revealed several new features of iPhone OS 3.0 at WWDC today. One of these features is "Find My iPhone," and it is only available to Mobile Me subscribers."

The two biggest bits of news, for me at least, were the "Find My Phone" and the data wipe features. Having misplaced my iPhone a time or two, and having it on vibrate mode to add to the frustration, I was very happy to hear about this feature. Best of all, even if your iPhone is in vibrate mode, it will still send an audible notification. They haven't outlined just how loud it is yet, but it is still a welcome feature. If it isn't in hearing range, you can also log onto the MobileMe site get a general idea of where your iPhone might be located. You can also send it a text message to have displayed on the screen such as "I'm a dork, left my phone behind, call me at ###-###-#### if you have it." If you get no response, you can always wipe the iPhone clean, erasing all of the data. Of course, I'd have to give it up as a lost iPhone with no hope of return for this to happen, but it is very nice to have the option.

There were also some other updates to the service such as viewing iDisk files on your iPhone, accessing other users' public folders and the ability to search all of your email messages, even if they are only stored on the MobileMe server. Welcome updates to be sure, at least for me as a current MobileMe subscriber. If you aren't one, does this add enough to MobileMe for you to consider it or are you waiting for something else?