Jerry Fahrni

Lose your iPhone? No worries with Find My iPhone for the iPad

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Jerry Fahrni

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Mark Neuenschwander (@hospitalrx) turned me on to this app: Find My iPhone for the iPad.

The application allows you to locate your iPhone, send an audible and/or text message to your iPhone, remotely lock your iPhone or remotely “Wipe” your iPhone via the comforts of your iPad. Pretty slick.

The only downside to Find My iPhone is the required MobileMe subscription needed to set it up. I’ve had a MobileMe account for a while, but never had a use for it. I’m a Google man myself. Now that I’m packing around both an iPhone and iPad most of the time I finally have a reason to keep it.

My initial thoughts on using Find My iPhone were lukewarm. Nonetheless I decided to play with it a bit today, and now I’m convinced that it fills a void and serves a real purpose. It’s even given me a reason to keep my MobileMe account. With that said, I think this application should be offered as a free service by Apple. It’s a shame to offer a free application only to require a fee for the service.

The images below include screenshots of the iPad application as I sent a message to my iPhone and locked it. There is also a couple of screenshots of my iPhone after the fact and the confirmation email I received telling me what I already knew.

Comments

3 responses to “Lose your iPhone? No worries with Find My iPhone for the iPad”

  1. Konrad

    Question for you Jerry: I have an iPad (more accurately, my company has an iPad for testing our software that I get to keep most of the time) but still use a Blackberry for a phone until I am eligible for an upgrade from AT&T in December when I plan to get an iPhone. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using the iPad, but it seems that once I have an iPhone I won’t need it as much. You mentioned you carry both around – what’s the advantage of having both instead of just using the iPhone?

  2. Jerry Fahrni

    Hmm, great question Konrad. You made me think harder than I like to ;-)

    It basically boils down to the iPad screen. The larger screen makes it much easier for me to read emails, tweets and especially documents, which are much easier to deal with on the iPad. In addition I’ve found the iPad is a much better web browsing device than either my iPhone or my DROID; again, it’s the screen. The downside is that my iPad doesn’t have 3G, so outside my house I’m restricted to places with Wi-Fi like Starbucks, McDonalds, etc.

    That’s it. Believe it or not I still pack my tablet PC pretty much everywhere I go. You just can’t beat the functionality. I’m trying to get up the courage to go one month without my tablet PC and see what happens. I tried it for 24 hours and just couldn’t go on. After a little more thought and some additional apps I’ll give it another try.

  3. pillguy

    While I love my new iPhone 4, you really cant beet the size of the iPad as Jerry mentioned. It is just more like having a full sized piece of digital paper. I use it to read more, to review documents, spreadsheets, and web pages.

    Nice to see you finally coming around Jerry! :razz:

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