Tile Pro Series

A TRINKET FOR FINDING STUFF YOU’VE POTENTIALLY LEFT BEHIND SOMEWHERE.

TILE IS A small device you can attach to or place inside an item you want to keep track of. Its associated smartphone app can locate the Tile, or make it play a sound for you to find. It can even help if you’re out of range, by using its network of existing users to anonymously pinpoint your stuff and get you happily reunited.

The Pro Series’ Sport and Style models feature an improved 60m range, a louder speaker and waterproofing — so practically nothing can get in the way of this device doing its job. Setup is simple, but our first Tile unfortunately stalled during activation. The second went fine.

Locating a Tile can be spotty. It worked great at home, but failed to alert us to a Tile we had left in a Pyrmond café for three hours, despite hundreds of other Tile owners also being present in Sydney. (Maybe our taste in cafés is just that unique?)

The app also insists on always-on access to your smartphone’s location to support a feature that allows your Tile to locate the phone. This feature means that, while you would normally be using the Tile to locate it and whatever it’s attached you, it can actually be used in reverse as well, if you’ve misplaced your phone. But when testing on iOS, even though we chose the option of ‘When Using the App’ in Settings, we got frequent prompts to choose ‘Always Allow’.

If you often lose things at home or work, then Tile is useful. But its most attractive feature — finding lost stuff in the world — sadly fell short for us. The bottom line for this device is that it’s promising but it has some frustrating flaws.