But when you use Bluetooth to find a tracker, your phone is pushing out a continuous signal in search of it. The farther you move away from the tracker, the weaker the signal gets, and the closer you move toward it, the stronger it becomes. This technique is used to tell you roughly how far away you are from the tracker.

So what do the two underlying wireless technologies mean in practice?

Tile works with both iPhones and Android phones using Bluetooth technology to find items. Open the Tile app, select an item and hit the “find” button. The app will look for the Tile and send a signal to connect, after which it makes the tracker play a melody. If the signal connection is weak, it will tell you to move around until the signal gets stronger.

If your phone can’t find a Tile because it is outside its range, you can put it in “lost mode.” The tracker will search for other Tile owners who have granted the Tile app access to their location to help find other people’s lost items. If a Tile-owning Samaritan is near your Tile, that person’s device will share its location with the Tile network, which will show where the item was last spotted on a map.

Apple’s AirTag works with iPhones both new and old. Newer devices (the iPhone 11 and 12 series) can take advantage of ultrawideband’s precise locator abilities. To find an item, you open the Find My app, select an item and tap Find. From there, the app will form a connection with the AirTag. The app combines data gathered with the phone’s camera, sensors and ultrawideband chip to direct you to the location of the tag, using an arrow to point you to it. Older iPhones can track AirTags with Bluetooth using a method similar to Tile’s.

Similar to Tile, when an AirTag is lost and outside the range of your phone, you can put it in lost mode and allow other Apple phones to find the AirTag to help you see where the item was last spotted on a map.

To test the AirTags I asked my wife to hide several throughout our home and time how long it took me to find them.

In one test, she hid an AirTag attached to my motorcycle key somewhere in our bedroom. Apple’s Find My app used an arrow to point me toward the mattress and I pressed a button to make the tag play a sound. After rummaging through the covers and peeking under the bed, I found the AirTag crammed under the mattress. It took about 90 seconds.

The toughest was an AirTag hidden inside a book. Apple’s Find My app pointed toward the correct shelf, but it couldn’t tell me precisely which book the tag was shoved inside. After removing four books from the shelf and flipping through pages, I found the AirTag inside a cookbook. This provided my wife with three minutes of entertainment.

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Separately, to test how the trackers worked when they were too far from my phone, I attached a Tile and an AirTag to both my dogs’ collars and put the tags in lost mode when my wife took them for a walk. Nearby smartphones eventually helped me locate both trackers to show me where the dogs were in the neighbourhood.

But the AirTag is far from perfect. I wished they were louder — they are very quiet compared with Tiles — so playing sound wasn’t very helpful for finding them. I also did not love that for most purposes, AirTag requires buying a separate accessory, like a key ring, to hold the tracker.

In contrast, the Tile has a hole punched into its corner to attach to a key ring or zipper head. (Apple’s official holders start at $45, the same price as the AirTag itself.)

The New York Times