Where the heck are my keys? WSJ Personal Tech Columnist
Joanna Stern finds out which lost item tracker is the best. Photo/Video: Drew Evans/The Wall Street Journal
A quantitative analysis of my life would probably reveal that I spend three whole days a year searching for lost belongings. If I'm not looking for my keys, it's my work ID, wallet or glasses.
Where tricks for the absent-minded fail me, technology is ensuring I never lose anything again. Or at least that's a promise of the so-called Internet of Things: As more objects get low-powered wireless chips, they'll be in constant communication with each other—and our phones.
But heck if I'm going to wait for Marc Jacobs or Coach to embed wireless chips into their accessories. Instead, I tested Bluetooth tags that attach to my wallet, keychain, work ID and purse, and pair with my smartphone so I can keep tabs on them. Of course, that means I better not lose my phone.
Phone Halo's TrackR, Protag's Duet and Tile's tracking devices cost less than $25, are easy to set up, and are no bigger than a poker chip, so they don't really get in the way. All three resulted from successful crowdfunding campaigns. Apparently I'm not the only forgetful technophile out there. However, some work better than others in particular situations or locations. Tile and TrackR can leverage a community of users to find what's lost, but they're only as good as the number of people using the app.
Duet (orange), Tile (white) and Trackr (black) are connected to the Internet so you can find items, such as your keys, when they're lost. Drew Evans/The Wall Street Journal
At Close Range
These trackers work best when you've misplaced your items in close proximity, which is usually the case for me. (Yes, my glasses are often right on my head.)
When the trackers are in range of your phone's Bluetooth radio (100 to 150 feet), the app's proximity meter indicates how close your keys or wallet may be. Tile gives you text clues ("It's about an arm's length away") while TrackR and Duet show wireless signal strength.
Duet and TrackR let you set alarms that sound off on the phone and the tracker when the two are no longer connected. That is, when you've walked away from your precious belonging. TrackR's iPhone and Android apps even let you configure a song to play if the alarm is triggered. I chose the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feeling."
But even if you never again lose your keys, you may lose your mind with this feature. Anytime I stepped out of range—taking the garbage out, charging my phone in another room—the sensor on my keys tripped, and alarms (and that song) began blaring. TrackR says it's working on smarter sensing that can automatically disable alerts if you're still in the area. TrackR sometimes sounded off when a tag's Bluetooth connection failed. At this point, I'll be happy if I never hear Tom Cruise's famous pickup song again.
The alarms were extremely helpful when locating stuff in the bottomless vortex that is my big, multi-pocketed purse, however. All three apps let you sound an alarm manually to guide you to a misplaced item. Tile's loud, melodious tones were the easiest to hear at a distance, even beneath all the rubble in my bag.
Widening the Search
Because these tags rely on Bluetooth and don't have GPS or cellular Internet connections, they need a phone to determine their geographic location.
The upside is that the trackers are small and have batteries that last a year. (Duet and TrackR's are replaceable; Tile charges $20 for a replacement tag when it runs out of juice.) But the downside is that if I drop my keys on the street or in the back of a taxi, I'm pretty much out of luck, unless a kind stranger finds them and tracks me down.
While the apps report the last time the phone was in touch with the tracker, the map pins aren't accurate enough to be helpful. TrackR didn't always update a tag's location until I opened the app, either. Once, when my house keys were in the trunk of my car in New Jersey, the map insisted they were 23 miles away in Manhattan.
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Phone Halo, which makes TrackR, says the issues I am experiencing could be related to the way the iPhone handles Bluetooth signals in the background. "We're working to maximize reliability," says the company CEO, Chris Herbert.
Duet's map got confused once when the tracker wasn't connected, pointing to a spot off the west coast of Africa, where neither I, nor my keys, have ever been. The company plans to fix the bug soon.
Tile and TrackR have other ways to find your stuff—ones that could one day create a massive crowdsourced lost-and-found radar. Any phones with their apps installed can quietly report the whereabouts of your tagged items to you. For now, it's unlikely someone sitting next to you on the train has these apps, but it may help if you can convince your friends or family to download the apps and sign up for the service.
Instead of texting my colleague who sits next to me to ask if I had left my ID at my desk, I asked him to install the Tile and TrackR apps on his phone. Without any involvement from him—or even his knowledge—I was able to see on my phone's map that my ID was in fact "last seen at 9:10 a.m." at my office. His phone pinpointed its location.
Tile's crowd-finding feature consistently worked better than TrackR's. My colleague often had to launch the TrackR app near my keys or ID to locate them, while the Tile seamlessly identified them. Duet plans to add a crowd-searching feature to its app this summer.
Overall, Tile was better designed and more reliable than the others, calmly keeping watch and pointing me toward my misplaced stuff when it went astray. Unfortunately, Tile only works on iPhones, and, due to a limited initial production run, it won't ship to new customers until this fall.
If you can't wait, the $25 TrackR is your best option, especially if you're on Android. But heed my warning about proximity alerts and alleged map pinpoints.
Yes, these trackers are still finding themselves, but if along the way they can save me from wasting time in my daily frenzy, they seem worth the minimal investment.
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