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Find My iPhone Triggers MobileMe’s Free Account Limit

Rumors of some features of MobileMe going free started surfacing online days before the public release of iOS 4.2. On November 22nd, a few hours before Apple flipped the switch on the new OS, Find My iPhone – a MobileMe functionality that allows users to remotely locate and wipe the iPhone and iPad – went free for all iOS users running the latest firmware on last generation devices. It turned out, though, that enabling the feature for free on older devices wasn’t that difficult.

Apple’s refreshed MobileMe offering, however, comes with some limitations, namely the impossibility to activate Find My iPhone for free more than 3 times on a device.

TiPB reports:

TiPb Forum member milani started setting up a few accounts and after the 3rd he was greeted with a popup that said:

Cannot Sign In

The maximum number of free accounts have been activated on this iPhone.

Which, as you may recall, is the same error message that was originally discovered by MacRumors in a new framework Apple introduced in iOS 4.2 GM build. There’s still some speculation going around about Apple willing to make even more parts of MobileMe free, but we think that we’ll have to wait for major cloud announcements in 2011 for that.

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Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, and Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more.

He can also be found on his other podcasts on Relay FM: Connected and Remaster, two shows about Apple and videogames, respectively.

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