Find My iPhone is an awesome feature, but we think it's slimy of Apple to require a MobileMe subscription for it to work.
There really is no such thing as a free lunch. While Apple added Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe features to OS 3.0, it requires a MobileMe subscription ($99 a year, www.me.com) to use. So if you’re a cheapskate like some of us at Mac|Life--we answered with a decisive, “No thanks,” when asked by the friendly Apple salesperson if we wanted to purchase AppleCare for our iPhone 3GS, only to grit our teeth and open our wallets a few days later to shell out $99 for MobileMe--you’ll be peeved to learn that Find My iPhone is going to cost you.
Still, the ability to remotely locate and control your phone--and even wipe the data on it if need be--is probably worth the 100 bucks, especially since, despite MobileMe’s limitations, it’s still a handy service.
Make sure you mean it when you choose to wipe your iPhone. You can restore your data afterward, but it takes a while to really wipe it clean.
Activating Find My iPhone is easy. On your iPhone tap Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and tap the slider next to “Push” to “On.” Then head to your Mac and open a Web browser. Log in to your MobileMe account and click the Settings icon. It will probably ask you to re-enter your password, and once you do, your account settings will appear. In the bottom-left of the left-hand pane, Find My iPhone appears as an option. After you click the button to locate the phone, you’ll see a map with the phone’s location on it.
To display a message on the screen, and/or make it play a sound (even if the ringer is turned off), click Display A Message. If you also want it to play an alert sound--a not unpleasant echoing ding--check “Play a sound for 2 minutes with this message.” After you click Send, the phone does its thing. But if you’re hard of hearing, be warned: The alert sound is not very loud, and even though it overrides the silent mode switch, it only plays at the ringer volume the phone was set to before you turned off the ringer. So if you normally keep the volume on the low side, it might be hard to hear the phone if it’s in another room or even--as in our tests--in a metal file drawer inches away from where we sit.
Once you tell MobileMe that you want to wipe your phone, it becomes impossible to locate or use.
If it turns out that your phone has in fact been stolen or lost, Remote Wipe can erase the phone’s contents--including apps, contact data, email account settings, all of it--to prevent whoever has it from accessing your info. If the phone is just missing temporarily, you can restore the data on it from your last backup. Initiating Remote Wipe negates Find My iPhone’s ability to locate the phone, however, so be sure to locate the phone before you wipe it.
Reason #87 it's important to back up your iPhone regularly.
If you physically find your phone after it’s been wiped, you can restore its contents. Wait for the Remote Wipe to complete--it took a couple hours to wipe our 8GB iPhone 3G. During the wipe, you’ll see an Apple logo on the iPhone’s screen, and if you’re in MobileMe, a message saying “Location Not Available: Find My iPhone has been disabled because a wipe request is pending.” After the wipe is complete, you’ll need to restore your data from a recent backup in iTunes: Connect your phone to your Mac. You’ll see a box asking you to set up a new phone or restore a previously synced phone. Choose the latter and click OK.
