Saturday, March 22, 2014

The Tile

The Tile is a new way to find things. It is a a small Bluetooth tag that can be connected to things like keys, laptops, and wallets so that you never forget or lose those items again. Tile which completed a crowdfunding campaign in 2013 will be shipping in the summer of 2014.

The Tile is pretty slick. That is is the way to describe it. It almost looks like a product that would be launched by Apple. It is a sealed tag that does not have battery replacements, (when it dies you buy new ones) and a is a sleek white. A very unobtrusive design, compared to old style keyfinders.

The app itself is nifty. When looking for something users simply pull out their smartphone and use the app to be directed to where the tile is, based on distance from the tile. As you get closer you can have the Tile beep to give its final location. If you forgot an item somewhere, the app records the last GPS location of that item so you can always go back and find it.

But where the Tile app really comes into its own is when something is stolen or completely lost. When this happens the user can mark the item as lost then every other Tile user can basically search for it with their phone. So you essentially create a networked radar to find the lost item. If someone's phone detects the item then you are sent a message as to its last known location.

There is one possibility of Tile that, if it doesn't exist already, (Tile didn't present it in any of their material) should be added. Instead of just helping the user find an item, Tile should stop them from ever being lost. This could be done through a passive mode of when the users phone gets more than some distance away an alert is sent telling them that they are forgetting something. This kind of functionality could keep a lot of flashdrives from being left in computers and keys on tables.

Overall, the Tile is an nifty piece of hardware, and while the software has neat features it needs expanding.


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