How many times have you set down your phone, your iPod, anything really, then walked away without remembering to pick it back up? (Only today I left my iPod in my desk drawer at work.) While replacing an iPod could be enough to make you cry, the price you pay for your replacement is pretty much the same as what you originally paid.

Not so with AT&T subsidized iPhone's.  

iPhone users have developed a special kind of relationship with their phones and just the thought of loss or theft is enough to instill a panic. While we've discussed third party apps that attempt to help you locate your phone as well as the theoretical potential of such a feature, first hand accounts hadn't yet surfaced.

Until now.

Kevin Miller, blogging at The Intermittent Kevin gives us perhaps the very first real-world field test of how Find My iPhone works. The Austin, TX native, in Chicago for Brickworld, the largest Lego convention in the world, left his iPhone on the table while eating in a "sketchy dive bar" only to return less than five minutes later to find no phone.

Then it occurs to him that he just activated his Find My iPhone. This sets off a day spent repeatedly calling his phone, sending display messages to whoever found it, then finally tracking the phone down to a neighborhood. Miller tells an amusing and exciting tale with a happy ending, but some of the issues he raised prompted questions.

For example, it appears that if the thief turns off your phone, this simple act renders Find My iPhone a worthless service. That seems a rather too easy way to prevent tracking if you're a thief in the know. Also, if the battery runs down because the lowlife who pinched your phone doesn't have a charger, that limits the window of opportunity for you to make good on the finding part of the service. 

 

 

This also prompted the question of what happens if someone simply yanks your SIM and replaces it with their own? Will Find My iPhone work if all your data is erased and factory settings are restored? For someone who doesn't have a MobileMe account such unanswered questions can make plunking down the cash for a service of dubious utility a serious sticking point. 

While Find My iPhone is a killer feature, we'd like to see Apple bring a bit more user-end control to the service such as allowing you to crank up the volume if it's set low if your phone is lost instead of stolen and you're trying to find it in the dark. Or the ability to begin taking photos and uploading them to your MobileMe account similar to what some laptop anti-theft services provide. And as Miller helpfully suggests, there's no reason why push notifications can't work both ways, with the iPhone helpfully updating its location status on its own, rather than relying on you to refresh locations.

Most importantly, letting you track the lost device on another iPhone rather than needing laptop/desktop access for updates. Not everyone who uses this service will happen to have a 3G capable laptop at the ready for real-time results. Checking your email at home, only to drive out to a location and have the iPhone thief driving somewhere else seems less than absolutely ideal as a solution.

Still, Apple should be applauded for at least coming up with a solution that, as we've just learned, comes to the rescue when needed.