Tile tracker review: why I prefer these gadgets to Airtags

The Sun

2 days ago

IF you ask any of my friends, family or colleagues to describe me, it's very unlikely that the word "organised" will be mentioned.
There's only one reason that I ever manage to leave the house on time with my keys, wallet and phone: Tile trackers.
Tile Essentials Bundle, £74.99 from Amazon
BUY HERE
The nifty little gadgets attach to your keys, wallet or any other easily misplaced item, allowing you to easily find them with your phone.
They work very simply; you attach them to the item of your choice, then hook them up to the easy-to-use Tile app, which you can then use to locate your belongings if they get misplaced.
How much are Tile trackers? You can get an individual Mate tracker, which attaches to your keys or bag, for £24.99. The multipack I'd recommend, which also includes a credit-card-shaped tracker for your wallet and a sticky one for whatever else, is £74.99.
Do Tile trackers need a subscription? You don't need one — and I don't have one myself — but to unlock features like longer location histories and smart alerts, you will need a Premium subscription, which starts from £2.99 per month.
Can you use a Tile tracker for luggage? You can, but having dived into some Reddit threads, it seems an Airtag might be better-suited to this because of its bigger crowdsourcing network.
Who's it best for? Ditsy people like myself, whose keys, wallet or phone are never where they left them.
What we loved: The easy-to-use app, and the fact you can use a button on the trackers themselves to locate your phone.
What we didn't: I've never loved having to pay a monthly fee to use a product I've already purchased to its full capacity, and it's not as good as rivals when you need to track your belongings to a faraway location.
They come in several guises.
The quintessential tile tracker is the Tile Mate, which you can hook onto your keys or bag — anything that you can hook a keyring onto.
There's also the Slim, a credit-card-shaped tracker that sits snugly in one of the slots in your wallet, and the Sticker, which you can attach to your remote control, laptop, bike or whatever else you like — you could even stick it in the glovebox of your car.
Finally, there's the Pro, a slightly bigger unit that claims to be the only Bluetooth tracker with an SOS button, which people can use to alert friends or family that they're in an unsafe situation.
I'd recommend getting the Essentials bundle, which includes two Mates, a Slim and a Sticker. (Unfortunately, the Pro isn't included).
It clocks in at £74.99, but you'll find that it — and other Tile trackers — often go on sale during key shopping periods like Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday.
For example, during the most recent edition of Prime Day, we saw a 3-pack of Tile Mate trackers drop from £54.99 to just £27.49.
Once you've purchased your Tile trackers, you can track your belongings in two ways.
The first is to trigger a loud ringtone, which you can use to find your keys if you've accidentally lost them down a sofa cushion or left them in the pocket of your jeans.
The second is by checking its location history, which is helpful if you've managed to leave your keys in a taxi or at a restaurant — I can still see a wallet I lost abroad nearly three years ago.
Here's my favourite bit, though; as well as using your phone to find your keys, you can also use a nifty button on your keyring to find your phone.
For me, this is the Tile's real party trick; you can't imagine how much I misplace my phone, and being able to find it using my keys or wallet has probably saved me hours of throwing sofa cushions around and dragging coats out of my closet.
Plus, it's something not offered by its biggest rival, the Apple Airtag.
Tile Essentials Bundle, £74.99 from Amazon
You can, of course, get similar results to the Tile Mate using the Apple AirTag — they even offer a couple of advantages, mostly regarding location accuracy.
Airtags also have replaceable batteries, whereas you'll have to replace your Tiles after three or so years when the batteries run out (unless you have the Pro, which has a replaceable battery).
Finally, Airtags have the distinct advantage of not charging customers to unlock certain features — while you can use most Tile features for free, to unlock features like 30-day location history or smart alerts, you have to pay a monthly fee.
Having said that, I've never felt the need to get a Premium subscription, and AirTags are marginally more expensive — they also currently only come in one model, meaning you need to buy extra bits to attach them to your keys or wallet.
Oh, and Airtags are only compatible with Apple devices, so if you don't have one of those, you don't even have a choice to make.