Find a stolen iPhone... for $99 a year?

Apple today introduced a new and admittedly very cool feature called Find My iPhone. But the catch here is that you'll have to have a paid MobileMe account to be able to use it. And that service is not cheap at 99 dollars a year.

But this really cool feature could be irresistible and just plain invaluable for some, so this feature might be the one that could draw in all those iPhone owners to crowd the servers once again.

Anyway, Find My iPhone in MobileMe enables you to find your iPhone through its GPS receivers, whether you just misplaced it or left it at the diner. It will beep a lot when you send a message to it, so that you or other people will be able to notice- regardless of whether it was in silent mode or not. If it's stolen, you can also wipe it remotely, and the deletion of all data will be instantaneous.

If you do get to find your iPhone after instantaneously wiping it out, you can still retrieve all data through backup anyway, so it's a big win of a feature.

It's just so unfortunate that the Philippines doesn't have any decent GPS maps, really. I would actually subscribe to Me.com in a heartbeat if I got an iPhone. If ever I get it, that is.