鶹
Customer Review
- Reviewed in Canada on March 30, 2023Update: we've had them for about six months now. Two have stopped working. One is slightly cracked but that's only the cover and shouldn't affect functionality. The other required me to open it, reseat the battery and close it regularly. Now neither works anymore, even with a battery replacement.
I'd still recommend them but with the caveat that they are not nearly as durable as "the real thing". Of course a four pack of Atuvos costs about the same as, if not less than two of the "real thing" so even with 50% attrition it's a reasonable price.
Original:
Given the price I was a skeptical but I am now convinced. We've tested them with our kids' backpacks and jackets (they are frequently left at school, at friends and at their various extra curriculars) and they are detected within minutes almost anywhere by Apple's ubiquitous Find My network.
Truly losing something attached to these trackers around town is going to be hard to do (provided they stay turned on). They also have a speaker that is loud enough to find the object if you're in the same room and it's not too noisy (& the item it's attached to is not buried beneath a mound of clothes).
You can't find them accurately close to you using UWB technology the way you can with AirTags and a very recent iPhone (11 or later IIRC) but that's what you get when you buy an item that's half the price of the Airtag.
Over the past few days I've been comparing these Atuvos trackers on Apple's Find My network to a Tile tracker on its own network. Sadly (I say as an Android user), there is no comparing the two networks.
Despite supposedly being the #2 network after Apple's Find My network Tile struggles to find the tracker when it's away from home. While the Atuvos are detected within minutes by the Find My network it can take upwards of an hour for the Tile tracker on the same object to be detected by the Tile network, and that's during the busiest time of the day when there are a lot of people out and about! I haven't tried finding the Tile during off-peak hours but I don't expect that it'll be particularly satisfying. I hope that changes soon but sadly that's the reality if you're on the Android ecosystem.
Tile's app proudly reports that there are 6900 devices with the Tile app within a 10 km radius of where I am. That's not so impressive when you consider that well over 500,000 people (more like a million) live within that 10 km radius and probably close to a half million current generation iPhones pass through that same circle every single day. FYI I'm just east of downtown Toronto along the Bloor-Danforth subway line so that 10 km radius circle includes all of East York, most of downtown Toronto and some of North York and all of the downtown segments of the north-south and east-west subway lines
Even though the Atuvos is not an Airtag and is treated like an accessory by the Find My app, it's far more useful for keeping track of items that are at risk of being misplaced away from home than is the Tile.
My one knock (so far) against the tracker is that it has an on-off button. I would prefer not to have that and have it always on. I suspect these trackers will sometimes get accidentally turned off at the bottom of a backpack.
FYI some of the complaints I read in some of the reviews suggest impatience or a lack of attention to the listing details. Here's what I've observed. The Atuvos-tracker is an iPhone/iOS-only product. It does not work with Android. When first paired the battery shows as almost empty. After a few moments the battery's status updates and shows as almost full (for the four I got). At first I could not Play Sound from within the Find My app and got an error stating the tracker was "not reachable", and to try moving around (even though I was sitting next to it). A restart of the iPhone fixed that error; closing the app wasn't enough.
All in all, for the price you just can't go wrong provided you have an actively supported iPhone or iPad!
