Find My iPhone: If only I could find myself so easily ...
Mel gave you the instructions for how to set it up... but dear reader, we're going to go in-depth into the features of using MobileMe's Find My iPhone to see how well it works in locating and securing your phone from a remote location -- including performing a voluntary wipe.
Locating where your phone is via map
When you bring up the Find My iPhone page in MobileMe, the first thing you will see is a map giving the approximate location of your phone. As indicated above, my phone is somewhere inside of my apartment. Because the map is powered by Google, you can toggle it among plain map, satellite, and hybrid views of the location. However, the feature won't give off an exact address. So, if you happened to leave your phone inside of a shopping center complex, you'll still have to visit each store to track down the phone.
Read on for more into Find My iPhone's features ...
Display a Message/Play a Sound
For this part of the test, I activated the feature that will leave a message on your iPhone in case a good Samaritan picks it up, and also gives you the option to play a sound if you think the iPhone is still in your house.
My condo is about 830 square feet, with my desk tucked into the corner of the dining room. I shoved my phone deep into a basket of laundry on the other side of the place and turned on message/sound option. The "ping," which sounds more like a radar signal, was nice and clear even on the other side of the condo. The second location I hid the phone was a storage container inside my bedroom closet. I couldn't hear the phone from my desk or in the hall, but once I opened the bedroom door, I could hear the phone. The mileage you'll get from the "pings" will vary based off how many walls and layers of soundproofing are between you and the phone, but the feature works well enough that you shouldn't have a problem using the sound feature to find your phone.The message side of the feature is pretty straightforward, and you can customize it however you want. Just be wary that if your phone is in public, someone may be able to get ahold of your phone number if you choose to have it displayed. Of course, if you're a parent and have control over a kid's iPhone or iPod Touch, it's a fantastic method of leaving them notes to do chores by!
Remote Wipe
For the sake of science, I also tested out the Remote Wipe feature, since there was a fresh backup of my iPhone due to the 3.0 install. Once I clicked the button, I got a request asking me if I was sure I wanted to completely wipe my phone. After acknowledging it, I sat back to wait.
So, what will you see if you're a naughty little person who has not only stolen my iPhone, but has figured out the passcode to unlock it? Well, suddenly, the screen will go black in your hands and the Apple logo will appear. Congratulations, you now have a very expensive brick with the Apple logo on it. Enjoy!
On my end, the iPhone suddenly disappeared from the MobileMe map, replaced with the words "Find My iPhone has been disabled because a wipe request is pending." I also got an e-mail to my MobileMe account informing me of my impending wipe, that it would take up to two hours, and that the process could not be reversed. That aspect is very true. I tried hooking my phone up to iTunes after the wipe started, and it did not stop it. So, I settled in to see how long it would take to wipe the phone. That aspect of the experiment failed, since I fell asleep while waiting for the phone to be wiped. What I did see when I woke up was a request for the iPhone to be hooked into iTunes. When I did that, the phone activated and went back to the default home screen. From there, all I needed to do was restore my iPhone using my backup in iTunes.
iPod touch and More
For those of you who have the iPod touch, fellow TUAW blogger Robert Palmer says that all of the Find My iPhone features work just fine with both first and second generation touches. The only thing that the first generation touch lacks is the ability to hear the "ping" sounds.
Michael Jones also informed me that he was able to set up more than one iPhone under his MobileMe account, so he could track both at the same time. He also lamented that, because he couldn't access www.me.com from the iPhone, he couldn't use his phone to track the other registered phone if need be. It's actually a very good idea and, who knows, a free app may come down the pipeline to address this need. But, other than that, Find My iPhone is a service that works extremely well and makes the MobileMe service itself a lot more attractive.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Brian Bock said 11:40PM on 6-17-2009
There's a bug. If your phone's volume is set low, you won't hear the signal. Apple should have it ignore the volume setting.
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A said 12:25AM on 6-18-2009
Agreed. I noticed this during the 3.0 beta and wrote to apple about it
Ryan valle said 11:48PM on 6-17-2009
I have mobileme but am too fearful to try out remote wipe. My question is after a remote wipe, what happens when a thief plugs it into their computer? They can re-activate it just like that? or do they need some sort of account info to get it working again?
My guess it that a remote wipe just saves your personal data and pretty much hands the phone over to the thief.
In addition, im a 1st gen iPhone owner that tried out the MobileMe stuff. Im sure the ping sound and important message feature is the same thing as the 3G, but as you probably guessed, the locate my iphone isn't so accurate. When I tried it out, it give a really large radius of my location. The center of the estimate was about 2 or 3 blocks away from where I really as.
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gorfgorf said 11:15AM on 6-18-2009
Nope. A remote wipe will do the same thing iPhones would do if you set up "wipe data after 10 failed password attempts" in settings. It's a complete wipe, and takes long enough that the phone must be zeroing a lot of your data (not just unlinking it) so no one would be able to retrieve it.
oliver hart said 2:35PM on 6-18-2009
what bothers me is even after you do a remote wipe, someone can still get it going if they have an att or tmobile account. your info is gone, but they still have a shiny new iPhone. i really wish apple would implement some sort of serial/imei number security so that if anyone did get ahold of your iPhone, they could never use it. i want my iPhone to be locked to my imei number so that i am the only one that can ever use it, with some sort of setting i can toggle in case i ever want to sell it.
Joachim Bean said 11:54PM on 6-17-2009
Find my iPhone can use either the cell tower location, or the Skyhook Wi-Fi location. Both do a pretty good job at finding the location (they both have about the same accuracy). It cannot use GPS, due to battery concerns, which would drain the battery FAST.
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Wakka said 12:24AM on 6-18-2009
Sadly, the iPod Touches can only go off of Skyhook, so it doesn't work sitting in my neighborhood in West Tennessee outside of the city. No surprise here. I even send them my router's MAC address and its location through their website, but no dice. It makes me question how big Skyhook's database is.
Macopotamus said 10:44AM on 6-18-2009
Maybe in future they could query the battery level and if there is enough charge use GPS for a short while. I forget if that sort of information is available in the public API, but that wouldn't be an issue for Apple.
SpinThis! said 11:06AM on 6-18-2009
If you only check occasionally, gps shouldn't rob the phone of too much battery—it's not like you're doing turn-by-turn. Apple omitted GPS support because it simply doesn't work indoors very well (if at all) depending on your location and that's where most people would benefit most.
totoro said 11:57PM on 6-17-2009
So how difficult would it be for a thief to disable the setting as soon as he gets your phone? Are we relying on the passcode to slow them down?
Just wondering if it makes sense to have the on/off setting be in MobileMe, not on the device, so it can't be easily disabled by anyone but the owner.
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A said 12:31AM on 6-18-2009
If the on/off selection is in mobile me than essentially you may as well not have it at all. I think having the option on the phone is for people who are paranoid about their privacy. ie. if you shared a mobile me account or where really paranoid and believed that someone could hack into it, they would in theory be able to stalk you and you could do nothing to stop them. In essence you have to turn the tracking device off at the tracker not at the device that communicates with it.
Godfrey said 3:44AM on 6-18-2009
There is a setting for that. It's called "Passcode Lock".
Yevgeny Smirnov said 7:52AM on 6-18-2009
Only if your iPhone _screen_ is locked with a passcode, one can't disable FMI.
If you've managed to "slide to unlock" the phone, "Find My iPhone" can be easily switched off in the "Settings" menu. And you're not prompted for the passcode even if you have one set.
wheels said 12:05AM on 6-18-2009
THE AT&T SITE IS DOWN!!! (THE ACCOUNT PAGE AT LEAST)!!!
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Steven Sande said 12:18AM on 6-18-2009
Why, oh, why did Apple wait until AFTER I lost my iPhone 3G a few months ago to come out with this wonderful feature?
I tried it earlier this evening; the first map showed the approximate location to within about two houses (approx. 250 feet). It then expanded to a wider view that encompassed about a one mile radius! Not sure what was going on there. It will be nice in the future when we all have devices with 2500 hour battery life and we can use true GPS tracking to find our devices. It's too bad they can't just turn on GPS for a few moments to get a good fix, and then shut it down to save power.
Steve
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Maddy said 12:19AM on 6-18-2009
It's actually a very good idea and, who knows, a free app may come down the pipeline to address this need. But, other than that, Find My iPhone is a service that works extremely well and makes the MobileMe service itself a lot more attractive.
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puhsitch said 2:07AM on 6-18-2009
Déjà vu
SpinThis! said 11:25AM on 6-18-2009
That would quite an undertaking and rife with privacy issues unless the user runs their own tracking server on, say, a home computer. And of course you would need to be jailbroken to be able to run apps in the background which would be necessary with this setup (unless you somehow circumvent Apple's push notifications to be able to run code). The second ingredient to this is remote wipe; I'm sure someone will probably find the private Apple API for remote wipe but don't expect any app store developers to be doing a "find me" service.
John Russell said 2:33PM on 6-19-2009
I'm going to be going on a two-month long bicycle tour in a few weeks, and I think this feature would be great to use in the unfortunate event that something happens to me or my iPhone. I'll just pair my phone with the MobileMe account of a trusted relative, or else just try out my 60-day free trial.
iddrisu said 12:32AM on 6-18-2009
I have an unlocked iphone on the Tmobile network. I upgraded but can no longer have access to my screen or any of the options on it. Its on emergency calls only, but interestingly I can still make calls by inserting phone numbers. Is there a way to correct this or to return to my 2.2.1?
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