Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
With ours I figured each of them would use a pair of batteries for a long trip (and I removed them at the destination, that was just from finishing packing until unpacking.) Considering that it ran an actual cellular transmitter I'm not going to be upset about it's power consumption.
Tile can only be used at a distance if someone else happens to be near the object, the cellular trackers phone home. It shouldn't be compared to the Tile units, but to the GPS/cellular units that these days cost several dollars a month. Tiles will tell you where you mislaid something, my TrackDots would tell me if my bag got sent to the wrong city.
Given that luggage tends to go to/from/via places where lots of people go and that people tend to come to places that act as crossroads of sort, I suspect that it doesn't take too many million Tile app users to be out there on the relatively beaten path for getting informed in a way that makes it obvious to the owner of a luggage item with a Tile Pro tracker that the luggage with the Tile tracker got sent on a plane to the wrong city.
Each of the three kind of trackers have their ways of working out better than other kind of trackers, but not having to deal with battery/recharging issues as frequently also has its benefits. I don't know of any place where a bluetooth tracker would run afoul of law enforcement authorities, but there are places where a GPS tracker could be an issue in a way that a bluetooth tracker would not be.