Trackr vs Tile vs kumo, which is the best option

#1

Looking to add a find my whatever (keys, wallet) as well as add one to my kids backpack. Thoughts and feedback welcome.

(Mark) #2

Not sure how useful a Tile would be inside a kid’s backpack. Your phone has to be within Bluetooth range of the Tile for it to work. Unless the kid likes to hide the backpack while you’re at home or something.

Tile is great if you tend to misplace your keys though.

#3

Do you mean find something which is lost in your own house? Or are you expecting to be able to find something which was left miles away?

There are also some finders which will beep if they get out of range of your phone, which people often use for keys if they’re always forgetting them somewhere. In my case, I use one of these on my car keys because I don’t drive myself and that way if one of my helpers starts to leave the house but has forgotten to leave my keys behind The keys will beep and I will get a text.

Some of the finders, and tile is one of these, have a feature where if you mark an item as lost then if anyone who has the same app walks within range of your item, then the service’s cloud gets notified and they send you a notification of where it was detected. The other person might just be walking by, they don’t know their app was used to notify the cloud. Which is both sort of useful and sort of creepy.

All of the Bluetooth finders tend to be in the $35 - $55 range.

If you want something that can find an item that is miles away and you don’t want to be rely on the whole crowd sourcing thing, you can get a GPS tracker. These typically cost $80-$120 per Device plus an annual data plan so people usually only use them on really important or really valuable things. There are a lot of different versions of these, including some intended for tracking kids or people with cognitive issues. But they do have their uses.

So there are a lot of different use cases for finders and a lot of different devices with different features. In order to find the right device for you, the first thing is to figure out exactly what features you want. :sunglasses:

#4

Thanks. Right now I’m using life360 for people finding. Works well. I don’t like the limited range on V1 tile or the fact you have to buy a new one when the battery dies.

#5

XYFindIt has a replaceable battery and makes a GPS version. This works quite well, but it’s expensive.

Life 360 has the advantage that it’s using your existing phone as the hardware. If you want to attach a smart phone to whatever you’re trying to track, like the backpack, then you can just use life360 with that. But the phone will have to have GPS and a data plan, you can’t use just a WiFi phone.

#6

Understood. Still figuring out all the applications of what I need

(Mark) #7

Tile is ideal for an object that you tend to misplace but isnt super likely to be very far away when you need to find it. So it uses a Bluetooth connection to your phone. If you do happen to really lose it somewhere then at least you’ll know the last place it was when it was connected to your phone. And if you’re lucky, someone else with a Tile may pass by it when you put it into “lost” mode so the location gets updated.

Life360 is for keeping track of family members wherever they are, so it uses GPS. Different equipment required.