Vodafone Curve
Track and trace your valuables
Bluetooth-tracking tags like Tile (from £15, Amazon www.snipca.com/33163, see our review, Issue 567, page 28) attach to your valuable portable possessions and report their presence to your smartphone – which can tell you where it last saw them – and to other nearby devices enrolled in the service, so the system can spot your lost tags using other people’s phones. It’s a great idea, but if you drop an item where nobody happens to pass by, it can’t let you know where it is.
Vodafone’s Curve has built-in GPS and access to the mobile network, so it can constantly check its own location and tell you over the internet. You can also set it to alert you when it leaves a geofenced area that you define. There’s a button on the Curve itself to send its current location, so if you give one to your child, they can give it a press to let you know where they are. Your cat probably won’t get the hang of it, though. The supplied keyring attachment could be clipped to a bag, and it’s waterproof.
Curve is in the same price bracket as Bluetooth-only tags, except that you’ll need a mobile-data contract, at £48 for two years plus the £20 up front. That’s not bad, but if you already have lost-key insurance on your home or car policy, it might be hard to think of items that are both easy to lose and worth that much to find. The Curve is too chunky to slip into a purse or wallet.
There are more catches. GPS and cellular data use a lot of battery, so the Curve will need recharging every week even in its Power Save mode, which only reports in every two hours. That means even geofence alerts aren’t instant. You can reduce this to five minutes, but battery life gets even shorter, and ‘real time’ updates are only available in 15-minute bursts.
The supplied USB charging cable isn’t standard, so you’ll need to keep it handy. Annoyingly, if you use more than one Curve, the app tracks them on separate maps. And the contract is exclusively with Vodafone, which covers 90 countries but, as some of us know from experience, not every corner even of the UK.
SPECIFICATIONS
GPS tag with cellular connection • IP67 water resistant • USB charger not included • Requires Vodafone contract (from £2/month for 24 months) • 16.4x42x42mm • 30g www.snipca.com/35916