We put Air Tag and Tile head-to-head to see just which of the key finders can be reunited quickest if you lose it.
A key finder like Apple’s AirTag or rival Tile, can make the frustration of temporarily misplacing your keys, wallet, bag, or any other possession, a thing of the past. These small devices, also known as location trackers, can be attached to your possessions — then if you can’t remember where you left the item, you can use an app on your smartphone to make the key finder emit a noise, making it easier to locate it. But what happens if your phone is too far from the key finder? Both Apple and Tile pride themselves on their community of users (those with the Tile app or a recently-updated iPhone) that can anonymously update your key finder’s location if they happen to pass by it. OK, that sounds great — but how fast will you really be able to find each of them? After all, Apple has a potential user base of 1.65 billion and Tile currently has 36 million users, so which will actually help you find your treasured possessions as quickly as possible?, We decided to find out by deliberately leaving an AirTag and a Tile out of range of our smartphone, timing how long it took each to be discovered by other users. The AirTag has the user base, but Tile is the more entrenched solution — so which would be found first? Around 9am one Monday morning, we placed both an Apple AirTag and a Tile Mate behind a street sign on a busy thoroughfare, around one mile from our home. We then returned home, marked both key finders as lost in their respective apps on our iPhone, started a stopwatch and waited. Within just 30 minutes, a notification popped up with the location for the lost AirTag as it had been identified by a passing iPhone, although the location given was the road that runs parallel to where we’d originally placed it, even though it was still in the original spot.
