Find My iPhone location tracking enables all-city chase
We're not 100% convinced of the safety of his approach, but Kevin Miller's determination to recover his lost iPhone -- combined with the power of MobileMe's new Find My iPhone feature -- led him on a wild chase across Chicago, which he visited while he was attending a LEGO convention in nearby Wheeling, IL.
We won't spoil the end of the story for you; Kevin's post is quite entertaining and worth a read. Still, once you do know how the plot turns out you may want to consider enlisting the police for a missing phone, rather than choosing to use their methods.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Nuno Sousa said 12:54PM on 6-22-2009
Great story.
I wish you could turn on mobileme's PUSH remotely. I have to keep it off so that my iPhone's battery will last for a single day.
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Scott said 12:57PM on 6-22-2009
Kevin's blog is blocked where I work. Damn your cliffhanger TUAW!
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waiownsyou said 1:17PM on 6-22-2009
Great story. Too bad the thief wasn't a tech savvy dude. If it were me, I'd toss out the SIM card and post it on eBay.
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Jesse said 1:22PM on 6-22-2009
A win for Kevin and MobileMe at the same time. Nice.
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Chad said 1:58PM on 6-22-2009
My phone before the iPhone was stolen, and I had sprint family locator on it with GPS support. After it was stolen I kept trying to locate it without success, until a few days later I finally found it. It popped up at a house in the back of my neighborhood and I immediately called the police. A patrol showed up about 2 hours later, and I showed them the location on the map and after they spent several minutes talking about how cool that technology was, they said they'd drive by and see if they noticed anyone outside using a phone. I expressed some surprise at this and was told that GPS isn't accurate enough for them to get a warrant and that's the best they could do.
I told them that if they weren't willing to go knock on the door and ask about it, I would. I mean, maybe GPS isn't terribly accurate but you could pretty much guarantee it was at one of three houses right there, most likely the house where the dot showed up exactly. But, they wouldn't do it. Later I went to knock on the door but couldn't get anyone to answer. I'm assuming that when they saw the text message saying the phone had been located, they got rid of it quick and it was a lost cause anyway.
So yeah, I think this feature is more useful for finding where you left it than actually recovering a stolen phone. That is, unless your local police are more helpful than mine. Of course, in that instance the remote wipe would have been really handy...
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awolf said 2:49PM on 6-22-2009
Seems like only a matter of time until one of these MobileMe adventure stories ends in a stabbing.
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derekknighttx said 3:00PM on 6-22-2009
Forgive my language... but FUCK YEAH GO KEVIN!
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whitakerz said 4:08PM on 6-22-2009
not to let the cat out of the bag(this will probably be patched soon), but you can access me.com from the iphone. can anyone say wunder radio?
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Thomas said 4:48PM on 6-22-2009
Shame you can't access that page from another iPhone.
I may be imagining it but after I updated to 3.0 my battery life was terrible. After playing around with every setting I decided to reset and start fresh, ever since I reset the settings my battery life has been far longer.
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dood2001 said 12:05AM on 6-23-2009
http://tinyurl.com/findmyiphn proof of concept that you can locate on iphone from an iphone.
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Alexander Acker said 5:26AM on 6-23-2009
Good job! They should make his story into a TV show. How about "iPhone Chasers".
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emil said 2:17PM on 6-23-2009
he was lucky it didn't get bricked
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