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When Apple previewed the iPhone 3.0 update at WWDC last week, one of the previously unannounced features was the new “Find My iPhone” service for Mobile Me users. Being a Mobile Me subscriber, I thought I would try it out and let you know how it worked.

I started by logging in to my Mobile Me account, but it took me a minute to find where they had stored this feature. I looked across the top row of buttons, but there was nothing new there. Finally, I decided to try the account tab, and after a little more looking, discovered the Find My iPhone option at the bottom of the left hand column.

As soon as I clicked the menu item, it started searching for my iPhone, and told me it may take a few minutes. After a couple of minutes, it informed me that the Find My iPhone option had to be turned on in my Mobile Me account settings on my iphone. I guess I should have seen that coming. So I turned to my trusty iPhone, fired up the settings app, went into my Mobile Me account under the Mail options, and there it was.

Now that everything was properly turned on, I returned to Mobile Me and, after I reloaded the page, I was finally rewarded with the location of my iPhone. Mobile Me quickly showed the location from last night with a corresponding date and time stamp, but after a few minutes it was able to give me a more precise location of my current phone. Having once turned on the feature in my iPhone settings, I no longer needed to interact with the phone to make any of this happen.

Now that I knew where my iPhone was located, I decided to try sending it an important message. This feature is designed to ask a good Samaritan who may have found your phone to please do something with it other than steal all of your data and sel it on eBay. Mobile Me provides you with a custom box you can use to personalize a message, and it also gives you the option to have it play a sound with the message, making it even easier to locate.

The service worked as advertised, displaying the appropriate message and playing a sound at full volume even though my iPhone was set to vibrate. Although there does not seem to be any choice as to what sound it plays, it uses the sonar ringtone, which should work fine unless you leave your phone on a naval warship of some sort. Delivery times did seem to vary. My first time, it seemed to be an acceptable minute or two before the message appeared. In subsequent attempts, I went from a mind blowing near instantaneous delivery to a “Did I do something wrong?” 15 minute delivery time. A nice touch here is the web page informs me what time I told it to send the message and the web page informs me via email when the message was delivered to the iPhone.

The final option is to do a remote wipe of the phone. According to the website, as soon as you authorize, it will begin erasing data immediately and should return the phone to its factory default settings. This is a great security option if you do not find your phone and the “Finder” chooses to ignore your frequent pleas for decency; you can still make sure they can’t start prank dial everyone in your contact list and start showing up for your dentist appointments.

There are a couple of caveats for this option. The first one is that the phone will still function as a phone, so if you fail to find your phone later you will need to cancel your wireless account with your provider since you will be responsible for any charges incurred. The other catch is that once you do a remote wipe you will no longer be able to use the Find My iPhone feature with that phone until it is restored, since it no longer knows you are who you say you are. I have yet to try out this particular option, and hope I never need to.

After spending some time trying out this feature, I am impressed by the simplicity and elegance of it. As a Mobile Me user, I am glad Apple has continued to increase the spectrum of my Mobile Me subscription, making it even more valuable. Much like my various insurance policies, the Find My iPhone feature is very comforting to know exists, but hopefully I will never actually need to do anything more than show off this feature.