I seem to have a tendency to lose my phone. I’ve lost a bunch of them and am now buying lower cost units. On my new Xiaomi unit, however, I notice that there’s a Find Phone feature. Can you show me how to enable this device tracking feature? Thanks!
Sorry to hear that you have problems keeping ahold of your smartphone, but as the devices evolve, it’s definitely true that they get smaller and thinner, even as they also seem to need to be plugged into the wall more than back when the technology first appeared. As a result, I suspect lots of people plug them into a wall outlet and forget about them until it’s too late: They run back to the store, restaurant, classroom and office, and it’s too darn late, someone’s snagged it as a spare phone or, worse, to sell on Craigslist and make a few bucks.
Actually, there’s a Web page that explores places people commonly lose cellphones! I mean, of course there is, it’s the Internet. The top locations to lose a phone are in a purse, at a restaurant, in a car, a changing room, airport security, school and a bus or subway. Now you know.
Like many companies, Xiaomi is aware of this frustrating circumstance and has added a phone tracking feature in its IMUI Xiaomi phone UI system called “Find Phone“. To use it, you’ll need to sign up for a mi.com account, but let’s go through the steps…
To start out, if your phone is relatively new, it’s quite possible that you’ll get a notification inviting you to enable the feature:
See it in the middle there? “Turn on Find device“. You’l lget this attractive information screen:
You can also get to the right spot by going directly to the Mi Cloud app. Once you’re there, you’ll see lots of status info, including a helpful indicator of how much storage you’re using on the phone itself:
Near the bottom is “Find device” and it’s disabled. That’s where we’ll focus our attention.
To enable it, simply tap on the on/off slider adjacent to the Find device labeling. Now it’ll tell you what ya need to do to proceed:
Yeah, it’s kind of a weird message and very wordy, but since Xiaomi focuses on phones for a world marketplace, not just the US (or China) there are lots of disclaimers and warnings. The gist of the message above is “we’re going to use your Mi account. Don’t forget your password!”
To proceed, tap on “OK“.
Enter your password – remember, you were warned not to forget it! – and Find device will now show as being enabled:
Pretty easy, really.
Now everything’s controlled by going to i.mi.com, as the splash screen tells you:
It’s probably worth bookmarking that address i.mi.com on your computer. Let’s pop over to that site just to see how it all works. Apple fans will notice a remarkable similarity to Apple’s me.com iCloud Web interface:
Quite useful, particularly once you enable cloud backup from within Mi Cloud on your device. Even if you do lose it, you won’t lose contacts, text messages, photos, and even recordings. Useful!
To check Find device, tap or click on the purple button. It takes a few seconds – or as long as a minute or two – but eventually it should find your phone and pinpoint its location on a map:
I’ve added the red circle so you can see my location, but notice it’s a fully interactive map so I could zoom in and see exactly where my Xiaomi 5S phone is, and recover it. Now, enable it on your device and good luck!