Can't Afford MobileMe? Try Undercover To Retrieve Your Lost Or Stolen iPhone

Not everyone can afford MobileMe, and some of us simply don't need all of the added features and storage space that it has to offer for the $99 price tag, but we all want to be able to track our expensive mobile device in case it is lost or stolen.  So what are we to do?  Well, there may be some hope.  Orbicule recently updated their iPhone and iPod touch tracking app Undercover with the ability to send Push Notificaitons, making it much more worthy of a purchase. Undercover has always been able to track your iPhone's location as long as the app is open, but the problem has always been making a thief actually launch the app.  Now, in Undercover v1.5, you can at least try to trick a thief into opening the app via a well-worded Push Notification. Here's how it works.  When you first download Undercover, you will be asked to register your device, for free of course, at Orbicule's Undercover Center.  Once you are all set up on the desktop side of things, simply launch the app again on your iPhone and its location will be logged into the website.  From there you can see your iPhone's current location, IP, and accuracy of location on a Google Map.  So now if your iPhone is stolen, you can log into the website and track its last known location, but to get an updated status, your thief is going to have to launch the app, and that's where the Push Notifications come in. Via the Undercover Center, you can report your device as stolen.  You will have to first fill out some Police details since it isn't exactly safe to go after your device on your own.  After that, you are brought to another page where you can fill out a custom Push Notification message or use one of the default messages to entice your thief to launch Undercover.  If your message is convincing enough, your thief will hopefully access your iPhone to follow the notification's lead, which will launch Undercover. Undercover will take its sweet time loading at this point or load a website of choice to distract the thief while the GPS coordinates and IP address are being sent to Orbicule's website.  Those coordinates will be sent directly to any police officer you have contacted and registered on the website. Of course, some thieves may be smarter than others, so the Push Notification may not be all that convincing, especially considering it says "Undercover" boldly at the top of the message.  According to Orbicule, there is nothing they could do about this, as it is Apple's policy to display the name of the app at the top of Push Notifications.  But as we all know, nothing is perfect, and $4.99 is a small price to pay for even a chance at recovering your stolen device. You could also use the Push Notification system to inform someone who has found your lost device of how to contact you, so that in and of itself may be worth the price tag. It's really too bad that we couldn't just have apps run in the background to avoid this whole mess, but developers have to work with what's available to them, so this is a decent solution. Embedded below is a video demonstration of Undercover in action.  It's very detailed, so it should give you a good idea of what to expect.

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