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.

iPhone Features Apple's Not Telling You

Although Apple already announced loads of features for the new iPhone firmware, there are some features (that are actually more hardware-dependent) that Apple may not be telling people. I'm not going to assure that these features will make it to the next iPhone, no doubt to be announced in Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference in June, but I'm convinced that they will be.

So, the next iPhone will most likely have (that Apple hasn't officially told us)...

1) Video recording

Even the most basic of phones have MMS and message forwarding, as well as basic blurry video recording. If iPhone 3.0 ticks the checkbox off the former two, then the latter's checkbox might be ticked off as well, as evidenced by this "Publish Video" screenshot.

This was found when someone tried to publish/upload a photo to Apple's MobileMe service. Typo? I think not.

2) Internet Tethering

If you don't already have a netbook that you can put a SIM card in, you can always use your cellphone as an internet modem. Essentially, if there's 3G or EDGE coverage, you can just connect the USB cord or connect the iPhone through Bluetooth to use it as a modem. Scott Forstall of Apple actually confirmed this feature in a Q&A but he said that Apple's still negotiating with cellular networks so it's not natively activated even in the iPhone 3.0 beta.

3) Faster Wi-Fi and 3.5G

There are rumors of Apple placing a Wireless-N (and a new 3G) chip inside the iPhone so that it can reach Wi-Fi and 3G speeds of up to 7.2 mbps. Technically, the number's not gonna be possible in our shores, but in America it sure will.

Information is quite scarce as of now, but as time goes, there will indeed be more features waiting to be unearthed. Who knows? Maybe there'll also be a whole other product to be announced in WWDC that will steal the iPhone's thunder- like a netbook? I might be crossing my fingers for a netbook if not for my insane aversion to them, really. The famous reality distortion field might change all of it, perhaps (since Steve Jobs is back in shape by then)?

SOURCES: Macrumors, Engadget