by Erik Tollefsrud | Erik@fndtn.com | Twitter.com/thefndtn

MobileMe is great, but one feature stands out as a must-have for iPhone users: Find my iPhone. For $99/year you have a convenient and safe way to protect your iPhone from getting lost or having your sensitive data compromised in the event of a stolen iPhone. No need to install software on your iPhone or the Mac/PC. Instead, you can access the “Find my iPhone” tools from any web browser on any computer.

It is my belief that if Apple drew more attention to the Find my iPhone feature they could sell more MobileMe subscriptions. Instead they market the main features as an email account and an online calendar. Sorry, but Gmail and Google Calendar work great as a free service. The day Google’s services are subscription-only or become less reliable than MobileMe will be the day I start telling people MobileMe is your email/online calendar solution.

What about MobileMe’s other features? I group MobileMe’s contacts feature in with calendar and email account; you get an address book free with your gmail account. As for Gallery (a place to upload your photos to share with other people) and iDisk, I find it hard to justify those features for $99/year because FaceBook or Flickr are where you’re probably already uploading and sharing your photos, and uploading files to your iDisk is probably not the first idea you think of when you need someplace to backup important data to. Granted, uploading your important files to the iDisk is a really great way to make sure you don’t “lose” your files later. This feature did come in handy when I was in college. Instead of saving my paper to a flash drive and hope that the files didn’t corrupt themselves in the event of accidentally ejecting the flash drive improperly or just flat out lose it, it was nice to know that any computer I went to to print out my paper was basically already there, waiting for me. But emailing a copy of your documents to your 7GB (or more) Gmail account has the same effect.

Again, I want to stress that the only thing you cannot get from any other service or product is Find my iPhone. Don’t think you’re going to use it? I think you aren’t thinking of ALL the possibilities. It may not happen a lot, but you don’t need to wait for the day someone actually steals your phone to use the Find my iPhone service. How about the day you are running late for work and you can’t find your phone? Just login to MobileMe and make your phone play an alert sound for a full 2 minutes. I wish my keys would do the same thing when I loose them.

What about when someone takes off with your phone? You’ve got a map of where the phone and probably the culprit are at. A simple call to the police and they’ll be surprised to know that you’ve already got the address of the thief. If you’re like me, you don’t require a code to unlock your phone. With Find my iPhone you can set a code and remotely lock your iPhone right from a computer that’s connected to the internet which basically locks the thief out of your phone. And, once toted as an enterprise-only feature, you’ve now got a self destruct button for your data which whips everything which can easily be restored after you get your phone back.

MobileMe is a full suite of online services that includes an email account, synced address book, online calendar that integrates with iCal, online storage space, and any easy way to publish your photos to the Photo Gallery, but the feature you’re not going to find anywhere else is Find my iPhone. To anyone with an iPhone, this is a must have service that’s well worth the yearly subscription fee.

Check out the video walkthrough below:

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