Chipolo Card Spot Puts Find My in Your Wallet
The AirTag is a powerful tracking device, but it won’t easily fit into one of your most valuable possessions: your wallet. Over at Macworld, Glenn Fleishman reviewed the Chipolo Card Spot, a credit-card-sized tracker that works with Apple’s Find My network, which uses nearby Apple devices to relay signals from compatible trackers.
The $35 Chipolo Card Spot sounds like a great solution to fears of lost or stolen wallets, but there are some caveats. Although it’s the size of a credit card, it’s as thick as three cards. It doesn’t support the Ultra Wideband precision finding that enables the Find My app to point you in the right direction with an exact distance. Also—most disappointingly—the battery isn’t replaceable and has an estimated life of only 2 years. Chipolo offers a 50%-off replacement discount and recycles the dead unit, but that’s still annoying and wasteful. Currently, the Chipolo Card Spot is sold out and not shipping until May.
Josh, is the Chipolo card about the size of a credit card, or a little thicker?
I agree it is a pity with such a short life. Since it’s as thick as three cards, what kind of replaceable battery exists that they could have used?
Other than compatibility with Find My, isn’t this pretty much the same as Tile’s “slim” product, which has been available for, what, five years now?
Well I got one and returned it immediately. They did refund my money. One is basically renting it from them. Why would I want to pay yet another subscription for something like this. And what if the company goes belly up. Then I have nothing and yet another electronic device in the trash. I consider it a scam.
I had the original Tile and sent it back also. In the contributions page when they wanted funding it said nothing about the battery not replaceable. Now, they have replaceable batteries in some of their tiles.
Also if you read the fine print the Chipolo has it’s limitations on the ability to find the wallet- as Apple dictates their “fine- (or precise) finding” standards. Air Tags do exact or precise finding with a certain models of iPhones. It mentions this in the MacWorld review.
That’s a pretty big difference!