Happy Birthday! Tonight you’ll be going out on the town! Forget driving – 10 of your closest friends hired a party short-bus that requires you to wear a quarterback helmet while aboard. This is the itinerary: lawn bowling at Brits! Get sake-bombed at Azia! Sacrifice your sobriety to the Tiki gods at Psycho Suzi’s! Chill at Seven! Get tranced at Myth! Wind it all down with Broadway Pizza, and once they close, head to Santana’s for a Cheesy Flower. You will be living in the moment! You will forget your favorite movies. You will not be thinking about racquetball tomorrow. You will neglect fine details… like which bathroom you left your iPhone in… until you realize it’s gone when you go for the Breathalyzer app.
Instant buzzkill.
What a sobering moment. Your heart drops into your stomach. Wait!! Fear not… Apple just released a new feature called “Find my iPhone”, and you are a MobileMe subscriber. That means that you can go onto your me.com account settings and click on “Find my iPhone”, and it will use the phone’s GPS to show on a map where your phone is. Not only can you do that, but you can send your phone a message to display for whomever finds it. You can also opt to sound an alert for 2 minutes, which will sound even if the mute switch is enabled. Pretty cool, huh? No need to stress, you’ll just find it later. Look at the upside: everybody you’d want to call is at the party, and anybody you shouldn’t call, you now can’t. You will sleep well until noon.
Fast forward to 3pm. You grab a Smart Water from the fridge and the half a gyro from Santana’s and plop down at the computer. Fire up your browser and log into Me.com. You find the Find My iPhone link, and click, ecstatically. You will be PSYCHED if this actually works! The map overlay says “Finding Your iPhone… (this may take a few minutes)” and you bask in your smug superiority because there is no other phone that offers this out-of-the-box, and can determine the horsepower in your car. That’s huge. Eat that, everybody.
“Searching… searching… searching…….. Find My iPhone must be enabled in iPhone OS 3.0 settings.”
…. WHAT?!?! Un-Be-LIEVABLE.
That’s right, mere mortals… Find My iPhone is not enabled by default when you install the OS 3.0 software. Don’t let anybody tell you to cheer up. You have no reason to. Find the nearest Cold Stone (with your computer, how arcane), get a Gotta-Have-It sized bowl of sadness, watch Firefly reruns and lament the tragedies in life. You’re hosed. FYL.
To recap: when it is turned on, it works very well. However, in all likelihood the first time you actually need to use it, it will probably be too late. You’ll have to wipe away the tears and shell out $500 for a 3GS and make be sure to enable it this time. When you go to enable it on your shiny new 3GS, it’s also not exactly obvious where that flip-switch is. To enable Find My iPhone, go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then click on your me.com mail account, and there you will find the switch to turn it on.
I have a couple of small suggestions that would make this service much better. Wouldn’t it be great if…
- … you could just lock the phone instead of wipe it?
- Also, remotely set one phone number it could dial while locked? The remote message is nice, but it can be easily ignored. While I would like to believe in the altruistic nature of people, I would also like to believe that Santa Clause is going to bring me the deed to a $500k house on 10 acres for Christmas. If you wanted to keep my lost iPhone, you could wipe it pretty easily yourself… so if I wipe it or you wipe it, it’s yours regardless if you are the unscrupulous type.
- How about set the ringer to full volume? The remote pager works even if the phone is on silent, but if the volume is turned down, it will not be all that useful even with the shrill tone is uses.
- One more thing: enable Find My iPhone by default.
I’m glad that we have it all figured out buddy. For the record, I would like the credit for figuring out the iPhone settings location.