Tile - 4 stars

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In our household, we've had our locks replaced almost every year. It's nuts. But we have around 8 sets of keys, we give them to the baby sitter on the weekends, visitors who stay with us and every so often we lose a set of keys. We look for hours and never find them. One year our son grabbed the keys, played with them and then left them somewhere. Our inquisition into where they were proved unsuccessful and then a few days later we found them in an art supplies box. Fun. There is a solution to this problem and it's called Tile. I purchased a Tile about a year ago and it recently arrived. I quickly paired it with my phone, and was sold. I immediately ordered another 4 pack to attach to all our household keys. In fact, last night I could not find my car keys and I wish I had the tile on. I eventually found them but it took me a few minutes of searching.

This is Tile [$25 @ Amazon, or $70 for 4 pack]

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It's a small piece of white plastic with a battery and Bluetooth radio. You install an App on your phone, pair your Tile, and then give it a name and purpose.

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Then you can launch your Tile app and it will show you where all your Tiles are. If you have multiple phone in your household, it can utilize their phones to locate items too.

The best feature in my mind is that you can issue a "locate" signal and the Tile makes some noise!

There are some interesting uses for this device:

  1. Keys
  2. Purses
  3. Remote Control
  4. Luggage

For us, the most useful application is simply keys.

I purchased the 4 pack a few weeks ago and it arrived yesterday. I'd recommend getting the 4 pack given the price per item is $17.50 vs $25 for one.

Any downsides?

I can think of two downsides.

  1. You need to have this app running on your phone, and using Bluetooth. Regardless of how battery friendly Bluetooth 4.0 is, you are still giving up some battery life. This is not a problem on my epicly awesome iPhone 6 Plus which lasts 2 days.
  2. The battery life of the Tile is about a year as far as I've read. That's a fairly expensive replacement cost if you have a few of these. In our case though, it's cheaper than having our locks re-keyed. Tile says they are working on a renewal / replacement program.

For these two reasons I give it 4 stars.

★★★★☆ Great. Worth purchasing.

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