Trackr Pixel Winning tracking device for lost items

For losers

The Trackr Pixel is a little plastic fob containing a Bluetooth chip to which your smartphone will connect when close by. You can put it on a keyring or stick it to an object. The point is that when it goes out of range, its app can tell you where you had it last, making whatever it’s attached to very difficult to lose.

What’s even better, there’s a large community of Trackr users (this is a new version, but they’ve been in business a while now) that serve as extra finders. When you activate Crowd Locate, their phones will look for your Pixel too. If they find it, the app will tell you, but not them. It’s a clever idea, and when we logged on in London we found nearly 5,000 Trackrs nearby, which is reassuring. Just try not to mislay anything in the Orkney islands.

It’s a similar concept to the Tile ( www. snipca.com/19841, see our review, Issue 489), with one crucial difference – the Pixel has a replaceable battery. All versions of the Tile so far are disposable as soon as their power runs out, which is typically after about a year. This means you’re paying 20-odd quid again (minus a 50 per cent discount if you trade in the old one). When the Pixel gives up the ghost, a new flat CR2016 cell (£6 for 10 from Amazon www.snipca.com/26361) will bring it back to life. Setting up the Pixel is easy. As with the Tile, the app tells you roughly where the Trackr was last detected via your phone’s GPS, then helps you find it with a signal-strength meter and the option of playing a loud noise on the Pixel’s tiny speaker. It only works at short range, so the app will lose track of it as soon as you move away, and other users will only locate it if they pass close to it and for long enough to register. It’s a bit slower to connect than the Tile, but does the job.

You can set a Separation Alert to warn you instantly if you move out of range, but this can give a lot of false alarms. And you can use the Pixel backwards to call a lost phone, which makes a sound even if it’s on silent – and this doesn’t require an internet connection. However, this was erratic in our tests.

SPECIFICATIONS Bluetooth LE tag

• Up to 30-metre range •

Requires a mobile device with IOS 8 or Android 4.4 or higher with Bluetooth LE

• 5.6x26x26mm (HXWXD) www.snipca.com/26360

VERDICT: We like the replaceable battery and the Trackr community, but it’s more reluctant to be found than its rival the Tile ★★★☆☆

ALTERNATIVE: Tile Mate £19 It’s slightly ig ly bigger and has a fixed battery, but connected faster for us; other sizes and shapes are also available

It stops you losing your possessions, but you may lose patience with its unreliability