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Find your Phone and your Piece of mind.

Something that always concerned me about storing so much info on my smartphone and relying on it so heavily was what would happen if I lost it? Well, thanks to the latest update to the iPhone iOS (4.2.1 at time of writing) Apple has made it a little easier to find, remotely lock, or wipe the data from your iPhone if need be.

What used to be only available to mobile me subscribers is now open to anyone with an iPhone 4 (and possibly earlier versions although that is not supported by Apple) as well as iPads and the latest iPod Touch. The app “Find my iPhone” is now free, and can be used with an unpaid account on Apple’s MobileMe.com.

All you need to do is install the app on your device, follow the setup instructions (there’s a link on the app’s startup page for convenience), turn it on and you can then log onto any supported idevice that has the app installed and locate your iPhone by using your MobileMe account info. Any idevice associated with your MobileMe account with show up on the map.

So what do you do if no other idevice is available? Thats when you can log into Mobile Me (me.com will get you there easily in any web browser) on any computer (windows or mac) and be able to locate your iPhone, giving you the ability to send a message to your phone, lock it remotely or wipe all your data from it. I haven’t tried the last one, but the other two work great.

If you accidentally lose it and want to let the person who finds it know you are looking for it and maybe give them a phone number to call so they can return it to you, the message may be the way to go. A very cool thing about this is that you will get an email sent to your default email account associated with your Apple ID that shows you the message you sent and the time and date it was displayed on the phone. Pretty sweet.

Locking it is another great option, and may in some instances be the first option you want to use to stop anyone from using your phone and running up your long distance bills for instance, or finishing that game of Angry Birds you’ve been struggling with for weeks.

And finally if all else fails, its always good to know that if you are really concerned with what may be confidential data stored on your idevice being seen or used by others, you can remote wipe it, basically setting it back to factory defaults which doesn’t get your precious idevice back, but at least it stops your personal info from being seen or used by others.