This evening I bought a replacement item tracker for the stupid Tile I had that ran out of battery. The Tile is a decent product, except their whole revenue model relies upon a terrible design. It had a non-replaceable battery, which means once the battery is out of juice, they force you to buy a new Tile. This isn’t something that happened because of an engineering limitation, this was designed to be like this. Once my battery ran out, there was no way that I was going to buy a new Tile, even at a discounted price.
Thus I switched to a TrackR Pixel tonight. It has pretty much the same functionality, with smartphone app and crowd sourced tracking as well. The biggest difference is that the Pixel has a replaceable CR2016 battery. You can get these at less than $1 each. I potentially may not need to buy another Pixel for years to come. That presents a dilemma for me actually. The TrackR company designed a consumer-friendly device that doesn’t rip off its customers, the consequence being I don’t need to give them money whenever the battery runs out. Yet I feel like I need to support them with my dollars for being a good company. Perhaps this means I give TrackR products as gifts?
Anyways, I encourage you to check out their products.