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4 ways to find your lost iPhone (and keep it from getting lost again)
2014 is just waking up and its house is trashed. There are champagne stains on the carpet, and its iPhone is nowhere to be found. Yikes. If you've followed in the New Year's footsteps and similarly misplaced your pricey pocket computer, there are a few things you can do to find it and prevent an unfortunate instance from ever happening again. Find My iPhone is a good bet if you had a night on the town and can't find your handset the next morning. It tracks the path of your iPhone and shows you its current GPS location while also notifying anyone who found the phone that it is indeed lost. For even more nuanced location data, GPS Phone Tracker is a great alternative. You can set the app to log your phone's location as often as every two minutes, which will give you the best chance of finding your phone's current location as well as how it got there. You can set up permissions for friends or other trusted users to view your phone's location, so you'll always have someone who knows where your phone is. Where's My Cellphone is a simple website that will call your phone for you. You can time the call or have it ring immediately, which is handy if you need to check your car or other location (far from your computer) for the device. The site has been used more than 14 million times already, and it will continue to be a go-to for the foreseeable future. If you find that you're losing your iPhone on a daily basis, you can go all-out and buy a protective case that also helps you locate the device. BiKN is a system of tags that go on important objects -- like your keys, purse, etc. They locate each other by activating alert tones. If you can find one of the objects you have a BiKN on, you can find them all. The iPhone case works hand in hand with the BiKN app to both help you find your important stuff, and have your important stuff find your iPhone for you.
David Pogue's iPhone lost, searched for, found, world safe for kittens
Are you sitting? You'd better be sitting down for this one. Go ahead, we'll wait -- safety first. Sitting now? Ok, here we go: David Pogue lost his iPhone. Don't worry, don't worry! It's ok -- he found it eventually. Pogue, author and personal tech columnist for the New York Times, lost track of his iPhone on an Amtrak train back from Philadelphia, and after searching for it on the train he discovered that it had been taken and powered down. Later, Pogue's phone reappeared online, so he was able to spot its location. After he tweeted out pictures of the location via Find my iPhone, Gizmodo tracked down the house corresponding to the GPS signal, and the local Prince George's County police stopped by to see what they could do. We hate to spoil the big reveal (which Pogue has posted to his NYT blog), but the happy ending is that David Pogue has been reunited with his iPhone, and all's right with the world once more.
Tips for protecting your iPhone from loss
Worried about losing your iPhone? You aren't alone. While many people lose their phones, there are a few precautions you can take in advance before it happens to you. Luckily for us, Jason D. O'Grady over at ZDNet recently lost (and found) his iPhone after it went missing for a few days, and he decided to share some of his tips on how to protect your iPhone from loss -- and how to get it back if you ever lose yours. Some of O'Grady's suggestions are obvious, like enabling Find My iPhone (which we have talked about here before), but there are a few more ideas on his list that may surprise you which you should check out. In addition, our very own TJ Luoma has a few more suggestions to maximize your chances of recovering your iPhone, and Steve Sande learned a few things after losing his iPhone a while back. The important thing is to take these steps before you lose your phone so that in the event of loss you are already prepared to try to get it back. While I don't do a ton to protect my own iPhone, I do use passcode lock, and I do a backup of it each and every day, just in case. Losing my phone would be bad, but losing the data on it would be even worse.
Steve Jobs on lost iPhone 4G prototype: it's an 'amazing' story
We can't say we expected Jobs to do a ton of talking about that little "lost" iPhone prototype during his interview at D8, but he was of course asked about it, and he did do some talking about it. While he started out with the expected "there's an ongoing investigation" statement, Jobs soon got on a bit of a roll, saying that "this is a story that's amazing" -- that "it's got theft, it's got buying stolen property, it's got extortion, I'm sure there's some sex in there... the whole thing is very colorful." No discussion of the device itself, of course, but we're sure we'll be hearing more about it soon enough. Update: Well, it looks like Jobs couldn't quite let the issue rest there. Later on in the interview, Jobs said that he had gotten advice to just let it slide, that "you shouldn't go after a journalist just because they bought stolen property and tried to extort you" -- but he said he couldn't "change our core values and let it slide," that he'd "rather quit." Check out the complete back and forth after the break.
Apple visited the iPhone 4G's finder before the police did
With all of the chaos going on around the lost iPhone case, everyone has more or less assumed that Apple is behind the police department's actions in searching Gizmodo Editor Jason Chen's house late last week. Of course, no one believes that the sheriff is working for Apple, but most people seem to be under the impression that Apple wants to get to the bottom of the case, and that the company is pulling strings in law enforcement to try and do that. However, some new information discovered by Wired suggests that the story may be more complicated than that. They have heard claims from an anonymous source that Apple already knew the identity of the person who found the iPhone, and allegedly sold it to Gizmodo. Someone identifying themselves as being affiliated with Apple apparently arrived at the finder's house in Silicon Valley last week, looking for the finder (and possibly the phone) but finding only a roommate, who didn't let them in. Wired's source also says that the person who found the phone never tried to keep it a secret and even contacted Apple and searched Facebook for someone to return the phone to. When money finally changed hands (from Gizmodo), Wired's source says it was "for exclusivity," and not for a sale of the actual device. Of course, this is all a mix of hearsay and conjecture, spoken by an anonymous source who may or may not know about the case. The bottom line at this point is that the police investigation is underway. If they find evidence that makes them believe a crime was committed, then we'll see them take action. Until then, though, it's unclear exactly what happened with the iPhone's finder and whether the "sale" was illegal or not. [via Business Journal]
The Gizmodo iPhone saga flowchart
Fast Company has come up with an awesome Gizmodo iPhone Saga flowchart to help us follow the increasingly confusing case. The flowchart allows users to pick what they believe to be the true facts, and it lets them follow the trail to its "obvious" conclusion. Possible outcomes include: it was all an Apple conspiracy, bloggers are journalists, and Gizmodo bowed to corruption to get site traffic. So, where did you end up?
Apple's next iPhone: what we know (and what we don't)
The iPhone 4G? iPhone 4? iPhone HD? Simply "iPhone"? There's plenty we still don't know about Apple's upcoming handset, like the name for instance, but thanks to an unprecedented leak and a whole bunch of peripheral rumors, we've got just about the most info you could hope for going into a major Apple launch. Follow along after the break as we parse through what we know, what we've heard, and what we hope for in the next iPhone.
Find My iPhone: Questions, answers, and suggestions
Mobile Me's Find My iPhone is a wonderful (relatively) new feature which can help track down your iPhone if it is lost or stolen, but it is not foolproof, and it must be configured before you need it. Q: "Is it true that Find My iPhone does not work if you have 3G turned off or lose your iPhone where there is no 3G service available (EDGE only)?" A: False. Find My iPhone works with the original iPhone, which did not even have 3G or GPS capabilities, so it does work with EDGE. If you have a 3G-capable iPhone and disable the 3G (Settings > General > Enable 3G > OFF) to save battery life, "Find My iPhone" will continue to work. Q: "Will find my iPhone work over WiFi?" A: True... sort of... Maybe... Not really. In my home I have very little or no AT&T service (or Sprint, or Verizon, or any other cell provider). I do have WiFi all over the house, and Find My iPhone has never failed to help me locate my iPhone when it is "lost" in my house. In order to test it purely over Wi-Fi, I put the iPhone into Airplane Mode (meaning that both EDGE and 3G were both disabled) and enabled Wi-Fi. I asked "Find My iPhone" to locate my iPhone and was told that it was near Orlando, Florida. It was, in fact, in Ohio. I repeated the test and it came back with the same information. Later, I tried the "Wi-Fi only" test from my home, and Find My iPhone could not find my location at all. However, even in Airplane + Wi-Fi mode I was able to use the "Display a Message" and "Remote Passcode Lock" features. So you may not be able to locate it on a map, but you still may be able to connect to it. Proper setup is your first crucial step All of this is a moot point if you don't have three crucial settings enabled on your iPhone. Without any one of these, Find My iPhone will not work. Settings > General > Location Services has to be on (this one is obvious, right?) Under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > (Your Mobile Me account), you must set "Find My iPhone" to ON. This is not enabled by default. Under Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data, you must either enable Push OR have fetch set to Every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or Hourly. If you disable Push and set Fetch to "Manually" Find My iPhone will not work.
