A FedEx envelope arrived a few days ago and I couldn't remember ordering anything thin and flat recently. With all the shipping stickers covering info on the envelope it wasn't clear who it was from. When I opened it up, I realised it was my Tile order. It's ironic that I'd forgotten about them, given they were ordered in a fit of frustration at losing things - in particular, my keys, which I'd recently lost for nearly a month. House key, car key, post office box key, all neatly bundled together on a keyring, and lost. They had to be in the house somewhere, because my car was at home, so the key must be also. But where the f%#k ARE they?!
It turns out they'd been in my son's bedroom - I must have absent-mindedly put them onto a shelf while I was tucking him in for the night. They were too high for him to see, and I didn't even think to look in there when trying to find them. The lights are off when he's dozing off to sleep so I couldn't see them. A perfect storm of obscurity! Of course, I found them only after starting the process of getting replacement keys. But during all this, I had remembered seeing Tile on Kickstarter and it seemed perfect for me. The Kickstarter process is all finished and it's now just a normal retail product you can buy from their website. So now I have four of them - let's see how they work.
The idea is simple. Tile is a round-cornered square keyring, essentially. You attach it to something you don't want to lose, activate it on your phone, and it talks to your phone via Bluetooth. Tile itself isn't aware of GPS locations, but your phone usually is, and notes where it was when it last saw your Tile. It can give you a readout of approximately how far away you are from your Tile (with a 100ft, so about 30M range, depending on walls and so on) but this is distance only, not direction. You can choose to have the Tile play a little tune to help track it down, or, if you mark it as "Lost", other people's Tile apps will send you a push notification if they get within range of it.
You can buy them individually or in packs - I bought a four pack during an (American) Father's Day promotion, which cost me $70 USD plus $21 USD shipping. So they're not exactly cheap. Also, it's worth noting that the battery is not replaceable and only lasts for about a year. I haven't cracked one open to see just how unreplaceable that battery is yet, but I will when one dies in a year or so! There's mention of an "expiry email" which is slightly concerning if it means the Tiles will be deactivated before they are actually flat, and apparently a recycling option which is probably not really viable from Australia.
The four tiles arrived via FedEx, and inside was a nice plasticky-paper envelope. Inside that was a foam and paper sleeve with the four tiles embedded in it. The colours are just on the background of the packaging - there's nothing to individually identify the Tiles themselves. You get a small manual which is really only a "Getting Started" guide - most of the real info is on the website, and more arrives in some welcome emails when you sign up for the app. There's also a sheet with two stickers in case you want to stick two of your Tiles to things rather than using the keyring hole.
Another thing to note is that the Tile is not as small as depicted on the packaging. It's not far off twice that size, in fact. But it's roughly the same size as the body of my Subaru car key and I haven't noticed it adding any annoying bulk to my key bundle in daily use.
The next step is to download the app to your Android or Apple device. The app is free, and if you have particularly altruistic friends they can download the app even if they don't intend to buy any Tiles. Why? Because if you leave your stuff at their place and mark it as lost, they can fire up the app and walk around their house, or places you have been together, and it will tell you if you left it there. This happens silently in the background for them, so there isn't a privacy or theft concern if a stranger with the app happens to walk past your lost item. You can however email the details of your tile to someone so they can register it on their device and actively help look for it. So my wife could for example also help me find my keys, instead of advising me to "put them somewhere you won't lose them, then". It must be nice to have such an orderly mind..
Anyway, once you have the app and a Tile, you wake up the Tile by pressing the E on the logo and holding it near your phone. It plays a short tune and then you can name it something useful and related to the item it's attached to. My first one, unsurprisingly, was "James's Keys". Apart from this registration process there doesn't seem to be anything tying a particular Tile to a particular device, so if you bought more than you ended up needing, I can't see why you couldn't on-sell them to someone who needs more.
So now my keys have an activated Tile on the keyring, and I have the app on my phone. After some basic testing, it was time for the real thing. So, to simulate them being properly lost, I gave my keys to each of my kids in turn, with the instruction to hide them somewhere in the house. However I did make it very clear that they had to remember where they hid them in case the system doesn't work and I need them to tell me where they hid my keys. My daughter hid them under her pillow in her bedroom. My son is slightly more devious and hid them behind a bookshelf in the livingroom. In both cases I was able to, starting from my home office, quickly narrow down the general area using the proximity gauge, and then hit the "Find" button which made the Tile play a tinny little song and be quickly tracked down. Both times took less than a couple of minutes before I had the keys in hand. When I compare this to the proportion of my adult life I've spent looking for my keys (and wallet, and phone, and my bluetooth speakers, and my shoes, etc..) this is a revelation.
yes i blanked out my address, Stalky McStalkington
I actually used it properly the other day. I had to go out, and I couldn't see my keys in the geek rubble on my desk. I fired up the app and "James's Keys" was out of range. So, I walked through the livingroom, kitchen and finally to my bedroom and along the way it suddenly started giving me range indications. Once I was fairly close I hit "Find", listened for the little tune and found my keys, in the pocket of my spare jacket, crumpled on my bedroom floor. Obviously.
What do I do if I lose my phone, then? Well, like any modern person I cry and die a little inside. But in theory to avoid this problem I could stick a Tile to the back of my phone, install the app on my wife's phone and use her phone to find mine. But (a) the Tile is somewhat awkwardly thick (about 5.5mm) to have stuck to the back of my phone all the time and (b) this is getting a bit too Tileception for me. I have used one on the authentication dongle I use for Amazon Web Services though, as it would be annoying to lose. I'm tempted to stick one to my car.
I haven't used it in the wild yet, though. As an avid Geocacher I am very familiar with following an arrow on my phone to find things in strange environments. The Tile app only gives you range, not direction, so you find yourself doing something of a warmer-colder marco-polo kind of dance to narrow it down. In a less-familiar environment, that is going to be more tricky than in my own home, where I can divide the search into the most commonly-used rooms and then listen for the Tile's song. But it is substantially better than just searching at random for a small lost object in one of any number of locations. Even just knowing it was last seen at such-and-such shop or this-friend's house is a huge head start.
Conclusions:
So here we are. Do I like Tile? Yes. Yes I do. It's not often that you encounter genuinely life-improving technology, but for someone as absent-minded and chronically messy as me, Tile is an absolute godsend. No, it's not cheap, and the whole "expires in a year" thing seems a bit annoying. But if you compare those factors with the inconvenience of, say, becoming an organised, tidy, functioning adult, Tile is an absolute bargain. I might have to buy some more.
There are other products around now, so do your homework if you like the general concept. Now that I've invested into the Tile ecosystem I guess that's where I'll stay for now. But if you've had a good experience with a competing product, feel free to let me know or comment on this review in this thread.
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