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I have a friend who has a penchant for losing phones. Miraculously, she recovered her phone twice — once it went all the way to Kasba from Central Avenue. The other time it she got it back from Gariahat. She is now on her 11th mobile phone.
The Apple device iPhone 3G S is disappearing off the shelves fast. From bank accounts to passwords, contacts and confidential files, everything can be stored on it. And the best part is, you cannot lose it.
There’s a service every iPhone user should subscribe to — MobileMe. It’s from Apple and will tell you exactly where your phone is. You can even remotely lock it so no one can peek into your documents, pictures or whatever you have stored in there.
MobileMe also pushes your email, contacts and calendar events over the air to all your devices. So your iPhone, Mac and PC stay in sync. Add a contact on your PC or Mac and it magically appears on your iPhone.
I suggest you sign up for a two-month trial. Go to www.apple.com/ mobileme. Your MobileMe membership includes 20GB of storage space for all your email, photos, files and more. Twenty GB of space is enough to store nearly 7,000 high-resolution photos. You can tell MobileMe how much of your 20GB to allocate to Mail and how much to iDisk (this is your disk in the cloud). Whichever way you split it, rest assured you’ll have plenty of space to store what’s important to you.
Signing up for MobileMe is easy enough on a PC and Mac. A wizard will guide you in setting it up. To set up MobileMe on your iPhone, follow these steps:
Tap Settings on your iPhone home screen
Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars and check that Fetch New Data is set to Push
Tap Add Account, choose MobileMe, and enter your account information
Tap Next and turn on Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks and Find My iPhone. Tap Save.
Find My iPhone will be available immediately and other information like Contacts, and emails will be available as soon as the iPhone finishes the initial over-the-air sync with MobileMe. Remember to also sync your Mac or PC with MobileMe. You will find an icon for MobileMe under Windows Control Panel. Click on it and sign in with your username and password. Similarly, on your Mac you will have to sign in to MobileMe under Settings.
If you lose your iPhone, go to www.me.com. Go to the Accounts tab and select Find my iPhone. With your iPhone connected to an EDGE network, a blue circle will show on the map within minutes. A smaller circle means a more precise location. If you see a green dot, that is exactly where your iPhone is. Find My Phone will also display a message on your screen and play a sound. Just write your message, check the box to play a sound and hit Send. The message will be displayed even if the screen is locked and the sound will play even if the phone is in silent mode.
Remote Wipe: If you still cannot find your iPhone or if your iPhone has been stolen, use remote wipe to permanently erase all your data. You will receive a confirmation email saying remote wipe has already begun. It will eventually reset it to factory settings. Later on suppose you find your iPhone, connect it to iTunes — which backs up all your data — to restore it to your current settings. And MobileMe will send all your calendars, email and contacts from the clouds back to your iPhone.
Photo Gallery: With this, you can allow your visitors to download full resolution pictures from the web. Select the album you want to enable it for. Click the Settings button on the top toolbar. Check the box for “Allow downloading of photos or entire album”. Once you click Publish, your gallery is set up for downloading pictures. If your visitors like the entire album, MobileMe will zip it up and the download will begin.
If you want to hide some of the pictures, select the album and click the Setting button on the top toolbar. Check the button for “Hide album on my gallery page”. When you click Publish, your album is properly set up. You will find the url for the hidden gallery on the top right-hand corner of the screen. You can share this link with select friends. The MobileMe Gallery web application is very easy to work with.
MobileMe is worth the Rs 6,000 you will have to pay every year. There are other great features that you will discover along the way. If you own an iPhone, you must have MobileMe.
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