Find My iPhone in action

iPhone owners (who also use MobileMe) were excited to hear that the two products could combine to help you find, recover, or remotely erase your iPhone if it was lost or stolen. Now there’s one man’s story of actually using it to recover his precious iPhone.

While attending a Lego convention, Kevin Miller left his iPhone on the table of the bar where he had dinner. This blatant act of abandonment, however, turned into a day of adventure when he used his MobileMe account to track down the man who stole his iPhone:

We parked along Medill and hopped out. It was a Puerto Rican neighborhood. On the south side of the street, an outdoor birthday fiesta was convening, and some of the participants eyed us three honkeys questioningly. Now at this point I had no fricking clue how we would find the phone; did I think I’d find it under a bush? I certainly didn’t plan to go door-to-door, nor did I expect the cops to regard a blue circle around the entire block as sufficient cause for a search warrant. I sent a third message to the phone that I’d been formulating in my head: “We have tracked the phone to Medill St. and are locating it. Please call 512-796-xxxx to help us and claim a reward.” Short version: WE KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.

Now granted, travelling to a neighborhood you don’t know in a town you’re not from to try and track down your stolen phone may not be the brightest idea (right up there with leaving your iPhone on a table), but it does make for a rather interesting guide on how the iPhone finder works, and how you can use it recover your device.

Read more at Happy Waffe.