Expert rating
Benefits
- Ultra thin tracker
- Supports Apple’s giant Find My network
- Loud alert sound
Our opinion
Apple users should not limit themselves to the AirTag when it comes to choosing the best tracker. The Chipolo Card Spot offers nearly all of the location benefits of the AirTag, but in a flattened, flattened design that fits better in a card holder or purse than larger rivals from Apple and Tile.
Best Prices Today: Chipolo Card Spot
$35.00
From finding keys left on a bus or dropped from a pocket in the park, to sounding the tracker’s alert to locate your remote, Apple’s AirTag and competing trackers have helped millions of users find objects as varied as keys, luggage, vehicles and pets using their Bluetooth wireless technology linked to connected networks of users.
the Apple AirTag tracker is incredibly popular, but while it’s small and compact, it’s, not to be rude, quite big.
Put one in your wallet and it will introduce an ugly and possibly uncomfortable bulge.
Chipolo, maker of the popular ONE tracker, has a new Card Spot tracker that’s designed in an ultra-slim form factor specifically to fit in a wallet.
You can buy wallets with built-in AirTag support, but even those can’t avoid the unattractive AirTag bulge.
Chipolo
The Card Spot is 2.4mm thick, a third of the height of Apple’s 8mm tracker. The AirTag’s 32mm diameter makes it shorter than the credit card-sized Card Spot (85 x 54mm), but it’s the thinness, not the length, that makes the Card Spot special.
Weighing 8.7g, the Card Spot is slightly lighter than the 11g AirTag, but you won’t notice the difference compared to a set of ultra-precise scales.
Dutch design company Secrid, which sells wallets that protect against NFC/RFID skimming, has partnered with Chipolo to sell the Card Spot alongside its Cardprotector smart wallets, but the Chipolo Card Spot will fit n any wallet containing a card.
It’s about as thick as two credit cards placed together, so the tracker does take up space, although nothing as obvious as inserting an AirTag.
Chipolo
sound advantage
Some AirTag users have complained that the Apple tracker, at around 60 decibels, isn’t loud enough, when you play the sound to locate it. Up close, its speaker is fine, but at 30m, it’s not always loud enough, especially if the tracker is slipped into a bag.
The Card Spot’s built-in speaker is much louder at 105dB. It’s not the loudest tracker – that honor goes to the 128dB Tile Pro – but it’s definitely louder than the AirTag alert sound.
The Card Spot’s battery lasts twice as long as the AirTag’s, but it’s not replaceable like Apple’s tracker battery. Instead, Chipolo has a Recycle & Renew service which means the old card will be recycled at the same time as you can buy a new one for half price if you register your tracker at the time of purchase.
Rated IP67, the AirTag is fully waterproof and dustproof. Rated lower at IPX5, the Card Spot is less water resistant (fine in a light shower) and less resistant to dust and other solid particles, but placed in a wallet or purse this shouldn’t be a problem. no problem unless you throw it in the sea or a sandbox. IPX5 is considered water/sweat/rain/splash resistant but not fully waterproof.
Otherwise, the Bluetooth Chipolo Card Spot works similarly to Apple’s AirTag – added and managed in the Find My app under the Items tab, with its location displayed on a map in the Find My app.
Chipolo
It’s officially certified by Apple, with a “Works with Apple Find My” badge on the packaging. So it connects to the Apple Find My network of hundreds of millions of Apple devices that use end-to-end encrypted Bluetooth technology to detect nearby objects and report their approximate location to their owner.
So even if the tracker is thousands of miles away, locked in your lost suitcase, the Find My app will locate it as long as the tracker gets close to a compatible device within Bluetooth range. If you leave an AirTag at a restaurant on another continent, you’ll be able to see its location once it gets close enough to someone else’s iPhone or MacBook.
As with the AirTag, you will receive a notification when you leave your item behind or when the Find My network locates your missing item.
Despite the certification, Apple usually reserves at least one advantage over its technology partners, and with trackers it’s a feature called Precise Finding that you don’t get with Chipolo trackers.
The AirTag features Apple’s U1 chip, which uses ultra-wideband technology to precisely locate and communicate with other U1-equipped devices, such as any iPhone 11 or later. . It uses data from the iPhone’s camera, Apple’s ARKit augmented reality platform, accelerometer, and gyroscope to guide you to a lost AirTag using sound, motion, and more. haptics and visual feedback.
From July, Chipolo will have a version of Card Spot compatible with Google’s Find My Device network for Android users.
The rival Tile Slim tracker is similar in size to Card Spot but isn’t certified to work with Apple’s Find My app or network.
Verdict
Apple users don’t have to limit themselves to the AirTag when it comes to choosing the best Bluetooth tracker. The Chipolo Card Spot offers nearly all of the location benefits of the AirTag, but in a flattened, flattened design that fits better in a card holder or purse than larger rivals from Apple and Tile.
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