The scatterbrained individual will find the XY Find it a useful tool. To the uninitiated, the XY Find It is a Bluetooth tracking tag that constantly communicates with your phone. You can attach it to anything and you will be notified if the tag is too far away. It’s pretty cheap, starting at $30 and features a myriad of tracking features through the companion app and a replaceable battery. Let’s see how well it does.
www.xyfindit.com
The tag itself is made out of a rather sturdy but decidedly unpremium plastic. It is on the bulky side when placed on a keychain and the keychain hole is extremely tiny. The hexagonal device comes in a variety of colours, but I’ve been provided with a green one. The battery can be replaced by popping open the cover via a notch on the side and purchasing another CR2032 battery to pop in. There is also an alarm button that you can press that produces an audible alarm.
After you download the XY Find It app, you’ll be taken through a tutorial to pair your tracker with your phone and it is a relatively easy process. When you tap the find feature in the app, the tracker will start beeping to indicate where the tracker is. The beeping is not incredibly loud and is quite easily overpowered by conversations, cooking, or a dog barking, so you can imagine how difficult it would be to hear the beeping in a shopping mall or restaurant. The way the app tracks distance is quite similar to Pokémon Go’s 3 step function. The app tracks the Bluetooth signal strength so it’s pretty much trying to catch a Pokémon every time you lose your keys, except much more important. After repeated tests, I found that the tracker has a consistent range of about 50 feet, which is more than enough for me since my phone usually never goes farther away than 50 feet from my keys.
The other main function is the geofencing feature. The app will alert you if you leave your keys behind and stray too far from it, and for the most part it works well. However, I had the geofencing feature turned on at home, and the tracker kept on telling me it was out of range even though it was right beside my phone in the basement.
There is also a track this phone feature that logs the GPS coordinates of your phone regularly to XY Find It’s website, and if you lose your phone you can check the last known location on the website. A little bit redundant compared to Google’s Android device manager if you ask me, but a welcome addition nonetheless.
Do I recommend this tracker? Yes and No. Yes if you are already actively looking for a tracker or you are scatterbrained. No if you don’t need a tracker. Even though the price on this thing is in impulse buy territory (I’m not going to stop you), if you know where your things are at all times, then the functions here will not appeal to you. However, I see this device being very useful if you attach it to your kids and you can receive a notification when they stray too far from you.
