Tile Mate (2020)

Product Information

We left the Tile Sticker in a local park and by the time we got home, we'd had a notification saying it had been detected by another Tile user. Equally, once you're back in that location, your phone will connect to that device and ring the alarm so you can locate it.

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Finding something misplaced at home is easy, but locating something lost elsewhere really depends on the wider community network - which may or may not work depending on where you are.It's a network that has many users - there are some 40 million Tiles out there (2021 figures) and anyone with the Tile app on their phone forms part of the finding community. Tile also uses other Tiles to determine the last known location of your tracker, if it happens to be out of range.

Tile’s 2022 lineup has longer battery life, longer range, and Tile’s 2022 lineup has longer battery life, longer range, and

Easy to use and with a great app, it's simple to connect a Tile Bluetooth tracker and locate your stuff if it goes missing. Once set up in the app, that's it - to find your devices you can open the app and hit what you're looking for, the alarm on that Tile will sound (if connected to your phone) and you'll be able to locate that item. The trackers all have tiny speakers on them; they'll play a shrill little ringtone when you press the "locate" button, and you go hunt down the noise. And yet despite the presence of these two heavy hitters, Tile has remained at the top of of our best key finder rankings, thanks to its mix of value and features, plus the fact that Tiles work with both iOS and Android phones. Even with the added benefit of nearby Echo and Ring devices, Tile still doesn’t match the user counts of either Samsung or Apple’s ecosystems.There are also free battery replacements, and the ability to share Tiles with unlimited contacts (so someone else can locate your keys, for example) - but you can share a Tile with another user as standard without a subscription. This is still far in excess of the other Tile models, as well as far in excess of the Apple and Samsung alternatives - so Pro is the model we'd go for. As noted above, each Tile has a two-way tracking feature that lets you press a button twice to make your phone ring. The size and shape of these trackers vary, with more expensive Tiles blessed with louder speakers and more powerful Bluetooth.

Tile Mate (2022) Bluetooth Item Finder, 76 m finding range Tile Mate (2022) Bluetooth Item Finder, 76 m finding range

The Tile Sticker has the most room for improvement, as I found the 2020 version's range to be limited and its alarm hard to hear. When not exploring consumer tech, Chris can be found riding his bike - and gathering all the data for later examination. It’s also got an IP67 water resistance rating which means the Tile mate is entirely protected against dust, and will survive being dunked into one metre of water for up to 30 minutes.Tile has tried to unify the look of its key finders, which means a Tile logo in the middle of the Tile Mate that you can press if you ever need to find your phone. The plastic itself may wear out by then anyway, but it means that the free battery replacements in Tile Premium are now exclusive to the Tile Pro (2022) in the new Tile line-up. The loss of the replaceable battery stings, but most other changes are for the better, and we won’t say no to three years of battery life.

Tile Mate Review | PCMag Tile Mate Review | PCMag

The three-year battery sounds great on the Tile Mate, but it comes with a catch — you can no longer replace your battery. While there's no matching the Tile Pro's range, you could make the argument that a 400-foot range is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. As noted, Tile's trackers have a two-way find feature that let you buzz your phone — a capability missing from Apple's AirTag, we should add. The feature isn’t the most comprehensive anti-stalking method we’ve seen and it won’t roll out until early 2022, but it’s a good start for Tile.You attach the tracker to whatever you want to monitor and pair the device with your Android phone or iPhone over Bluetooth. But those compromises are made up for by a louder speaker, greater Bluetooth range, and a battery that can be replaced when it runs dry. The tracker connects to your phone via Bluetooth, and you use a companion app (Android, iOS) to tap the misplaced item and sound an alarm. The Tile app reported there were 10,893 users within a few miles of our location, so we assumed the Mate would be located quickly, but it took just under three hours to get a notification.