Apple has just eliminated a major configuration requirement (and failure threat) for Find My iPhone for your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

Until now there were three settings [requirements] you have to have enabled in order to use Find My iPhone, they were:

1. Find My iPhone must be turned on (Settings > Mail, contacts, calendars > Mobile Me account)
2. Location Services must be on (Settings > General)
3. You must enable Push or set an automatic fetch for your mail (every 15 or 30 minutes, or hourly. Manual fetch would not allow Find My iPhone to work. Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data)

The first two requirements are obvious, in order for Find My iPhone to work, it has to be turned on, and in order for FMI to locate your iPhone, location services would need to be turned on as well. The third requirement however, never seemed to make sense to me, and as a matter of fact I was unaware of it until just the other day when I attempted to set my mail to manual fetch. I got a warning that said FMI wont work. Obviously Find my iPhone only works for the iPod touch, or Wi-Fi iPad models while they are within range of a Wi-Fi hotspot.

After reading an article related, I tried to set my iPhone’s mail fetch setting to manual and no longer got the warning, so I obviously jumped over to me.com/find to test it out, and alas it worked with my mail no longer fetching automatically.

I am going to assume that this is an iOS 4.2 upgrade related feature, as all 3 of my devices are iOS 4.2, I cant test it with older firmware.

Some might say this isn’t very important. Consider this: In the event that you lose your iPhone, prior to today, you had a one in 3 chance of failing to properly activate Find My iPhone, which will result in what? Exactly. So now its just that much more reliable!

What do you think? Let us know in your comments!