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The person who found it is a thief. There are procedures for handling lost items on a plane -- none of those include "take the item home and keep it for yourself."

Congratulations, OP! :apple:
 
Great story OP! :D
Gives me faith in law enforcement will persue this and they worked well with you. I suppose it's quite a pricey item to lose.
 
I think I need to write down the serial numbers of my iPhone and iPad to give to the police if this ever happens to me. I'm using the trial version of MobileMe right now and will order it from Amazon when it expires.

And congrats to the OP for getting your iPad back.
 
Hey there is an app in the app store called Taptrace Pro. It does the same thing as FindMyiPhone. I'm not sure how reliable it is compared to MobileMe, but I tried it out and it worked pretty well. You can send your iPhone a message so the thief can read it and you can login to their website from any computer and see where your iProduct is located on a map.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/taptrace-pro/id382164855?mt=8

It's 3.99 now, but I got it a few days ago when they were having a promotion and it was free. There seems to be a lot of negative reviews, but the developer said that is because there were a lot of activations during the promotion and their server couldn't handle it. It's been working pretty smoothly for me for the past few hours and they said the are going to upgrade their servers. Seems pretty good for the price. Have no idea about long-term reliability unfortunately. I guess it's better than nothing for people that don't want to or are on the fence about plunking down cash for MobileMe.

Hope this helps someone.
 
You people make me sick.
When you find something that isn't yours you do the right thing to try to get it back to the rightful owner. It's not yours. It's not finders keepers. Doesn't matter how stupid you think the person is for losing it.
You are scum.
Grow a spine. Have some integrity. Check your moral compass. Stop being a weasel.

OP, I enjoyed reading your story.
 
Of course, the thief is a thief. Once you taked something that you didn't own, you stoled it - and you're a thief. Simple as that.

By the way: Very nice story, this wanna make me buy an MobileMe account or. I only need the FindMyiPhone app, wish Apple just will sell this for money without having an MobileMe account.

Anyways, I still wanna check it out and see if iWant it.
You should do the same, and it's free. You can try an free 60-days trial:

https://secure.me.com/wo/WebObjects/Signup.woa
 
Another word of thanks for posting this. It's great that everything worked out. The find feature and calendar syncing among five devices are the reason I have MobileMe. I've snagged multiple MobileMe auctions on ebay and I'm good through 2012.
 
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