I just bought one of these from Amazon for my wife, who has been known to lose her keys. I paid almost $20.
This is a good price if you need four. Keep in mind you can’t replace the battery in these which is obnoxious.
I bought a set of these when they were new. The batteries died after a year, and there was no way to replace the battery. They’d give you a discount on new ones, but that’s a waste.
I’m guessing this is still the case, so I won’t buy them again.
Great information!! You just saved me 40 bucks that I would have rather had in my pocket.
They do have new models with replaceable batteries. Probably why these are showing up cheap on Woot. One year is the expected life, though.
Tile Pro and the new Mate are the only ones with replaceable batteries. I am not interested unless I can do so.
Tile’s pretty up-front about the non-replaceable battery. They even called it a feature, Re-Tile, that ensures you always have the latest technology. If shouldn’t have been a surprise.
That is NOT still the case; their latest models do have a replaceable battery (CR1632 or CR2032). But there are some downsides to a replaceable battery. In exchange for that, you get another opening in the case to let moisture in, to come open by accident, and to break when you fumble replacing the battery.
It doesn’t look like these are the latest model, but $10 each is I think the lowest price I’ve seen.
I just bought a Tile Pro to replace my old Tile devices. I’ve thrown away two generations as the batteries die, and it will be good to finally be able to replace the battery fairly cheaply next time.
I found this on the interwebs:
https://youtu.be/WrhM5ujSU6w
It doesn’t seem too tough to swap out the batteries.
Well, you do have to destroy the metal ring going around the outside, making it unreliable as a keychain.
These Tile Bluetooth trackers are a nice idea, IN THEORY. But there’s one thing that prevents them from being useful when you need them. The Tile app needs to running all the time, 24-7/365, on your phone for this to work. If you accidentally close the Tile app by swiping it away, you’re out of luck. If you reboot your phone and forget to manually launch the app again after the phone starts ups, you’re out of luck. If you playing some big memory hog game, or if you’re multi-tasking with lots of apps open, or if you open too many tabs in your web browser, the Tile app my get killed in the background because your phone is low on memory. In that case, you’re out of luck.
I don’t know why their programmers don’t code the Tile app as a background service that runs independently and invisibly all the time (and auto starts after a reboot). I think the Chipolo app, which is a competing Bluetooth tracker, works even if it’s not running in the background. That proves it can be done. I think this is a case of lazy programmers. BTW, all this pertains to Android only… I’m not sure how the Tile app works on iOS.
The Tile app on my Android has always started as a background service during boot-up. When I actually run the app, it shows reports of having seen the tracker recently when the app wasn’t running.
Comparing my experience (Android) with my brother’s (iOS), it does seem to work better on iOS. Part of that I think is differences in the two OS’s handling of Bluetooth connections.
Thanks for that info, super helpful as there are so many models and not all have replaceable batteries. I think that makes a huge difference!