Here's my review from 5 years ago of the Chipolo BlueTooth tag. Amusingly, Apple have decided to go with a user-replaceable battery - unlike many of their other devices. I wonder why they didn't go for wireless charging - like the TinTag had a few years ago?

Anyway, the Apple involvement adds three significant things:

1. Better directional navigation. Rather than just telling you how far away from the thing you are, it tells you roughly where the thing is.
2. Improved community features. Having everyone with an iThing being able to find your lost puppy is a game-changer. Companies like Chipolo could never get that traction by themselves.
3. Higher price. Because Apple.

The first two are genuinely useful. First generation tags were able to give you distance and play a little noise. Good for Apple on innovating. With 40% of the UK having an iDevice there's a good chance that someone will walk by your dropped keys.

But the price...

I used the Chipolo and TinTag for a long time - but I couldn't justify the cost. I just don't lose my keys that often. Having them on my luggage was vaguely useful when disembarking from an aeroplane - but hardly essential. In any case, you still want a physical tag with something written on it for people who don't have the right app.

I used Physical Web Tokens which also suffered from the same flaw - overpriced and inaccessible to the majority of people

Is £25 a reasonable price for insurance if you ever lose your bag, keys, or pet? Maybe. And I'm sure the PR teams will shortly begin churning out feel-good stories about how lost dogs were reunited with distraught owners thanks to the magic of Apple.

But do people lose valuable stuff that often? I want to know where I put the spare HDMI cable. Or which cupboard has the nutmug. Or who borrowed my favourite mug. No one is bunging a pony down for that.

I long for the world envisaged by Cory Doctorow in his book Makers - where smart tags are cheap as dirt and ubiquitous.

“One of the big barriers to roommate harmony is the correct disposition of stuff. When you leave your book on the sofa, I have to move it before I can sit down and watch TV. Then you come after me and ask me where I put your book. Then we have a fight. There’s stuff that you don’t know where it goes, and stuff that you don’t know where it’s been put, and stuff that has nowhere to put it. But with tags and a smart chest of drawers, you can just put your stuff wherever there’s room and ask the physical space to keep track of what’s where from moment to moment.

...

He reached for his computer and asked it to find him the baseball gloves. Two of the drawers on the living-room walls glowed pink. He fetched the gloves down, tossed one to Lester, and picked up his ball.

We're a little way off that dream at the moment. RFID tags are getting pretty cheap - but they're short range. You'd need a network of high-powered sensors in a room to be able to do basic location finding.

So, a hearty well-done to Apple for getting in to the physical location game. Let's hope it re-energises the sector and drives the cost down to ubiquity.

As I said in the review, the only downside is that it has a non-replaceable battery. I'm not sure I want to buy one for £20 and then throw it away after 12 months of use.

A few of you asked how tightly sealed the unit is - so I'm going to take one apart and show you its guts!

Warning!

Opening your Chipolo will almost certainly void your warranty, it will degrade its waterproof rating, and you risk breaking it entirely. Proceed with caution!

Opening it Up

There's a thin seam running around the outside of the Chipolo Plus.

A thin screwdriver can get between the cracks.

You'll need to go all the way around the casing in order to get it open. You will almost certainly crack and break the casing.

Battery

Once the top is off, we can see the battery

It's a fairly standard CR2032 - although it is tightly wedged in there. The original Chipolo uses the similar CR2025.

Parts

The plastic casing comes apart very easily from the electronics. We can see the three clips which need to be cracked in order to open the piece.

On the underside is a small foil disc which acts as the speaker, there's a button in the middle for interacting with the unit.

Chips

What's powering this unit?

The main SoC is the Nordic nRF51822. The smaller chip is the PAM8904 which controls the speaker.

Thoughts

The original Chipolo is a little fragile - but I'm not convinced that making the Plus unit sealed is a good idea. It feels wasteful to have a completely disposable unit.

It is possible to replace the battery, but you have to destroy most of the outer casing in order to do so. A slip of sticky-tape should be enough to seal it back up again - at the cost of aesthetics!

Manufacturers have to become more environmentally responsible when designing these gadgets.

Buy

You can buy a Chipolo using my referral link http://ssqt.co/NEvh for £20 - or £62 for a pack of 4.

Six months is a long time in technology, and Chipolo have just released the Chipolo Plus. They've sent me one for free to review. Set your bias filters accordingly!

Cost

The Plus is £20 each - or £62 for a pack of 4. They come in a variety of colours

You can buy cheaper trackers for around £10 - although they have shorter range and less support. At the lowest end, you can buy generic BLE trackers for a couple of quid

Chipolo offers customer support, a fairly decent app, and much better range. But is the price worth it?

Physics!

The first thing to note is that this is a sealed unit. This means it gains water resistance but loses its swappable battery. The Chipolo Classic takes CR 2025 batteries which only last 6 months but cost around 30p each to replace.

The Plus claims to have a one year battery life - but after that it ends up in the landfill. That's quite disappointing. Yes, keeping a stack of the correct batteries around is annoying - but a heck of a lot cheaper than replacing the whole unit.

The Chipolo Plus is a little bit larger than a £2 coin (5.9mm thick and 37mm wide) - but fits quite happily on a keyring. It is lightweight and solid - you're not going to notice it in your pocket or in a bag.

The App

The app has much improved from the original version. It doesn't crash, is usually quick to find the beacons, and doesn't take up much background resources. My Nexus 6 reports it using 32MB of RAM - its battery use is insignificant. In part, that's thanks to the efficiency of Bluetooth Low Energy. As the name suggests, it is designed for low power use.

But the strengths of BLE also come with Bluetooth's fundamental weaknesses. It can be really fiddly to set up. The first time I tried to pair the Chipolo with my phone, I got this message.

Or, as wiser minds once said:

“Next year it will work great” should be the motto of Bluetooth.

John Gruber

I got it working by following the instructions - so it wasn't that bad. Realistically, no worse than any other BT devices I've found.

Lost And Found

But what if you drop your keys while out jogging - how will you find them again? These tags are too small and under-powered to run a GPS chip. Instead, the app does the heavy lifting. Every time the app detects the beacon, it records the phone's location and uses that as the "last known location".

The Chipolo also allows you to share a tag with multiple people - so you'll be able to see if the Chipolo is in range of a family member's phone. It is a nifty idea - but quite lifestyle dependent. Does everyone in your family want a Chipolo? Do they all want the app?

If you lose your Chipolo, you can mark it as lost in the app. If someone else with the app comes within range, the Chipolo servers will anonymously send you the location where your device was detected. Again, a nice idea - but is it ever going to be useful? There have been around 100,000 downloads of the Android app - what are the chances that another user is going to wander by your lost keys?

Range

Chipolo claims a 60 metre range. I'd say that was broadly accurate - but it depends on the type of space you're in. At my office, with lots of Bluetooth devices vying for signal, it seemed a bit less than that. At home, the signal strength just about allowed me to detect the device wherever I was.

Mostly.

Because, sometimes, it just doesn't work at all. As I was writing this post I had the Chipolo right next to my phone - yet the app just wouldn't detect it! A few hours later, I got this notification telling me that it had been found by "the community"!

Issues like this only crop up rarely, but it is enough to reduce trust in the app.

Verdict

When it works, the Chipolo is great. The volume is loud - 100 dB according to the manufacturer - and keeps beeping until you find your lost items. If you need to keep track of physical objects, these sorts of BLE trackers are handy - but the software on the app is a bit of a let down.

The water-resistance is a nice feature - but I find the lack of changeable battery a real disappointment. I'm not sure that it is a worthy trade-off. And I'm definitely not a fan of throwing away electronics after only a year of use.

The Chipolo Plus is £20 - you can get a 20% discount using my referral link.

It is a nifty bit of technology but, unless you need the water resistant model, the Chipolo classic is the same price and a lot more environmentally friendly.