How to Never Lose Your Keys (or the Remote) Ever Again

No matter how careful we strive to be, we eventually lose things, even for brief moments: our keys, the remote, our wallets, headphones, you name it. The panic that sets in when something isn’t exactly where we thought we left it is unmatched — enough to send our heart rate into overdrive and put our “find it now” senses on high alert. And, sometimes, we do find what we temporarily lost, eliminating the hassle of calling to cancel credit cards, taking the bus or phoning a friend for a ride home, asking someone else to read us the dinner menu, or watching what’s on the TV already instead of flicking through for something better. There is, however, a way to never lose your keys, glasses, remote, or anything else for that matter, ever again — by using one of Tile’s handy short-range trackers.

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Tile Mate Essentials 4-Pack

Bundle Tile’s most popular trackers and save a sizable chunk of dough. For the price of three, you get Tile’s Slim card tracker, two Tile Mates (the keyring trackers), and one Tile Sticker, which isn’t completely flush (or even all that small), but you can still stick it on items like a remote without it being completely obvious.

How Tile Trackers Work

Available in several sizes designed to attach to keys, be stowed in your wallet like any other card, strung on a backpack, or stuck onto a remote or inside a glasses case, the trackers work by using Bluetooth technology to connect with the Tile app downloaded to your phone, meaning it’s best saved for items you know are within a certain range (typically 100 to 400 feet). That’s perfect, though, for the items you know are there but cannot find, which, truthfully, is most things most of the time.

Within the app you can track your Tiles on a map or view them individually on your personalized homepage. There, you can click on each item and “Find” it, which triggers a 15-second chime, set up smart alerts for whenever you leave an item behind, enroll in Tile’s item reimbursement program (which gives you a new Tile and money towards the lost item), and change the ringtone your Tile plays and the name of the item in your app.

We had no trouble connecting to items even two or three floors away from the item, and the ringtone — we chose Bionic Birdie — is more than loud (and objectively annoying) enough to lead you to the lost item.

What to Track With Tile Trackers

That said, Tile’s trackers do not use a GPS signal to locate items, meaning you cannot track a set of keys in real time if someone stole them. You do, however, have access to their last known location with you, which is wherever your phone and the tracker itself last made a connection. This is why we feel it isn’t necessarily the best use of a tracker to keep one attached to your luggage, which will inevitably lose its connection with your phone once it’s checked by a gate attendant and loaded into the cabin of the plane.

Instead, Tile trackers are perfect for smaller, typically home-bound items like your wallet, keys, glasses case, TV remote, headphones, checkbook, or tablet (if it can’t already be tracked on your phone). This isn’t to say Tile doesn’t have any use outside the home, but we found the trackers to be most useful when we needed to sound an alarm to locate an item that’s probably nearby — the same way you have someone else call your phone to help you track it audibly.

Feature Image Courtesy of ljubaphoto/ iStock