Serious Find My iPhone success

[Zeos]

During vacation, my boy left his iPhone on the seat of a Burger King in small New Mexico town. It was not until the next morning that we noticed it was missing. Thinking it surely was still around our hotel room, we launched Find My iPhone; but to our great dismay, the iPhone was located a few miles away, nowhere near us or the Burger King.

We jumped in the truck and tracked the phone down to an old apartment complex. Find My iPhone pinpointed the location to within a few feet, so we knew it was in either a certain upstairs or downstairs apartment. We knocked on doors with no luck. So the next question was, do we tip our hand by turning on the alert function, or do we just wait it out. We decided on the former, so I sent the signal to the iPhone. We could faintly hear the phone, and finally tracked it to the upstairs apartment. I knocked, but no answer, and then finally resorted to saying "Hello?!" through an open window. Two gals emerged from the back of the apartment, and I politely asked for our iPhone back. At first they denied, but I sent the alert again, and all doubt was dismissed and they handed it over.

So, MobileMe has paid for itself, but needless to say, I never want to go through that again!

 

[dZp]

That's great. Would love to have seen their faces!

 

[reliantj]

damn beotches...

 

[bigjnyc]

Glad to hear it worked for you. I found out this weekend that it doesnt work when in a moving vehicle. I couldn't find my iphone on the way back from a party this weekend. So I asked my GF to launch find my iphone from her phone to see if I had left it at the party, the error message "could not locate iphone" came back. Turns out I had left it in the trunk when I was loading some stuff so it was in the car with us the whole time, But good to know for future reference that the feature doesnt work if the phone is in a moving vehicle. Unless it was a one-off

 

[dgreen1069]

Is there anyway track down an iPhone without signing up for Mobileme?

 

[tempusfugit]

Glad to hear it worked for you. I found out this weekend that it doesnt work when in a moving vehicle. I couldn't find my iphone on the way back from a party this weekend. So I asked my GF to launch find my iphone from her phone to see if I had left it at the party, the error message "could not locate iphone" came back. Turns out I had left it in the trunk when I was loading some stuff so it was in the car with us the whole time, But good to know for future reference that the feature doesnt work if the phone is in a moving vehicle. Unless it was a one-off

Careful with your logic. The fact that it didn't happen to work once while it happened to be moving is in no way a clear indication that it doesn't work while moving. I've used find my iPhone/iPad while they were moving in vehicles many many times without problems. The location once found doesn't update to show real time movement or anything but it did work.

 

[greenday123]

Congrats on getting the phone back, glad MobileMe worked out for you!

 

[hchavarria]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

Real neat that it worked out for you. I paid a membership to MobileMe just to have this feature and the one time I needed it it tracked my phone within about a mile or two and when I arrived at the general vicinity I tracked it again and at that point it could no longer be tracked. My guess is that the phone was turned off so I couldn't locate it.

 

[bigjnyc]

Careful with your logic. The fact that it didn't happen to work once while it happened to be moving is in no way a clear indication that it doesn't work while moving. I've used find my iPhone/iPad while they were moving in vehicles many many times without problems. The location once found doesn't update to show real time movement or anything but it did work.

Yeah thats why I wrote "unless it was a one-off" at the end of my post. I know there could have been other factors involved and not the fact that it was in a moving vehicle. Maybe reception in the area or something.