WWDC: Mobile Me updated

Apple revealed several new features of iPhone OS 3.0 at WWDC today. One of these features is “Find My iPhone,” and it is only available to Mobile Me subscribers. However, the Mobile Me page includes a few other “Coming Soon” features that didn’t make it into the Keynote.

Along with “Find My iPhone,” they will also be including:

• Viewing iDisk files on your iPhone
• Sharing large files from your iPhone
• Accessing other iDisk users’ public folders
• Being able to search all of your server side Mobile Me e-mail messages

The first three items in the list will actually be features of a yet-to-be-released iDisk app. There are a few third party iDisk apps currently available in the Apple store that vary in their iDisk abilities, but this official app will make it even easier to use some handy iDisk features and increase the value of a Mobile Me subscription. Being able to access your iDisk content from your iPhone has been a much requested feature of Mobile Me users in the past.

The e-mail search feature appears to be built in to OS 3.0. According to the Mobile Me new features page:

iPhone OS 3.0 brings search capability to Mail on your iPhone. Now you don’t have to flick through your inbox, tapping messages to find the e-mail you’re looking for. You can search messages by sender, recipient, subject, or all headers. And if the message isn’t on your iPhone, Mail searches for it in the MobileMe cloud. When the message is located, you can display it on your iPhone with no problem.

And in case you missed the big announcement of this group, Mobile Me will also give you the ability to locate where your iPhone is using an interactive web page that includes a map showing its location. It will also allow you to override the silence switch and have it play a sound to make it even easier to locate the device. It will also allow you to have a a custom message on it to ask someone to call you if they find the phone and, finally, to be able to remotely wipe out all of its data so no one can have access to your data if you can not recover it personally.

The “Find My iPhone” feature is expected to be available on June 17 when the new OS is released, and I suspect the mail search feature will be available at that time as well. The iDisk app is currently listed as coming soon, so hopefully it will see the light of day sometime this summer. I imagine it will be able to sail through the app store approval process.

Product [Mobile Me]