Tag Archives: tracking device

The First Tracker With a Working USB-C Leash: Hands-on with Belkin SureFind Loop Cable Tag at IFA 2026

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No tracker on the market ships with an actual leash. Apple’s AirTag is a stud, so you buy a separate keychain loop just to hang it on anything. Chipolo is a disc with a small aperture punched into the edge. Google’s new Pixel Tag is a plain little monolith with the same problem. Samsung and Tile at least had the sense to build in a substantially wide hole or channel so you could pass a carabiner or leash of your own through it, which is basically an admission that they knew the leash was missing and left the job to you. Belkin’s SureFind Loop Cable Tag is the first one that just builds the leash in, and then goes one further: that leash is a working USB-C to USB-C cable you can unclip and use to charge the tag itself, or your phone, or literally anything else with a USB-C port.

It costs $24.99, weighs almost nothing, and the cable snaps back into the tag’s body to top off the 120mAh cell inside once you are done borrowing it. A rep on the IFA show floor in Berlin told me to expect roughly six to nine months of tracking per charge, a number Belkin has not put in writing anywhere yet. The tag itself is a flat white teardrop with one button, a status LED, and it is certified for both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub so it does not care which phone tribe you belong to. It ships in September across the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific. Europe, where Belkin just showed it off, does not get to buy it at all.

Designer: Belkin

A braided USB-C cable and a fabric carry strap are already built from the same material logic, a length of reinforced cord with a connector at each end, and Belkin’s actual design move was refusing to treat those as two separate problems. The loop threads through a bag handle or backpack zipper, clips shut with a small sliding toggle, and unclips into a functioning charging cable the moment you need one. Belkin has spent years making the loops and holders other brands’ trackers needed just to attach to anything, so the fact that this idea sat unbuilt for that long, inside a company with decades of cable manufacturing behind it, says more about industry habit than about engineering difficulty. Sometimes the obvious fix just needs someone willing to stop selling the workaround.

Using the cable means unclipping the tag from whatever it was hanging on, so the tracker stops tracking the thing it was tied to for as long as you are borrowing the cable to charge a phone at an airport gate. That is a fair compromise for most people most of the time, but Belkin’s marketing does not mention it, and a design this clever should be able to admit its own limits. There is also no published IP rating for this specific model, unlike the SureFind Card, which carries IP68 and can survive a dunk in water. A tag meant for backpacks and luggage sitting on tarmacs in the rain probably deserved that spec sheet line too.

Dual certification for Apple Find My and Google Find Hub means you can buy the tag without worrying about which ecosystem you’re in. However, it’s worth noting that you have to choose one ecosystem to tether your device to. If you’re an Apple guy, you configure it with Find My. If you’re team Android, stick to Google’s offering. Belkin is entering a crowded field days after Apple’s AirTag 2 and ahead of Google’s own Pixel Tag, both of which still lean on separate keychain accessories to attach to anything. Chipolo and Pebblebee already proved rechargeable trackers work and do not need replacement coin cells. Belkin took that idea and folded a second function into the strap itself, a leash that charges things instead of just hanging them. How that holds up outside a Berlin show floor, across the actual months of use it is being asked to survive, is the open question.

The post The First Tracker With a Working USB-C Leash: Hands-on with Belkin SureFind Loop Cable Tag at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Google’s Pixel Tag is making the same ‘boring’ design mistake that Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi made

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The Pixel Tag comes in exactly one color, a grey green called Fog, wrapped around stainless steel with a G logo stamped right on the front. It’s the same script Apple wrote with the AirTag and Samsung copied with the SmartTag2. A tracker spends its entire life clipped to your keys or your dog’s collar or tucked into a backpack pocket, which makes it one of the most personal objects you own. Google, of all companies, knows how to make hardware feel less like hardware. It just didn’t bother here.

Somebody at DJI figured out that a $60 microphone could come with snap-on decals, because apparently even a tiny accessory deserves a little personality. Motorola figured out something similar with the Moto Tag, which actually ships in sage green and a soft blue instead of the usual black or white default. So it’s not like nobody in tech has thought about this. It’s just that almost nobody applies it to trackers, and now Google has joined the long list of companies that had the chance and passed.

Designer: Google

The excuse I keep hearing, and I use that word deliberately, is durability. Metal survives drops, fabric doesn’t, case closed. Except my phone survives daily abuse inside a woven case, and so does yours, and so does every rugged Kevlar sleeve sold by the millions for devices far more fragile than a coin sized tracker. Nobody worries their phone case is going to disintegrate because it has some texture on it. A tracker being too delicate for color or grip is not a real constraint. It’s a decision that got dressed up as one.

Underneath that decision is genuinely solid engineering, for what it’s worth. The Pixel Tag measures 1.8 by 1.1 inches and just 5.4mm thick, which makes it noticeably slimmer than the AirTag’s 8mm body. It runs on a replaceable CR2032 battery rated for about a year, carries an IP67 rating for dust and water, and pairs instantly over Fast Pair with any Android 9 device or newer. The headline feature is Ultra Wideband combined with Bluetooth Channel Sounding, which gives you a literal on-screen arrow and distance reading instead of a vague “getting warmer” signal, though that trick needs Android 16 and Bluetooth 6.0 to actually work. It taps into Find Hub, Google’s network of over a billion Android phones, so a lost item can get spotted even when it is nowhere near your own devices. You can share access with up to ten people, ring it from a Pixel Watch, or ask Gemini through your Pixel Buds to ring it for you. All of that ships November 11 for $29, or $99 for a four pack.

Google already knows how to wrap good engineering in an object people actually want to look at, because it solved the exact same brief years ago with its speakers. The Nest Mini gets a soft, woven top because Google understood people don’t want to display a hunk of bare plastic on their kitchen counter. The Nest Audio does the same thing, fabric front, rounded edges, an object designed to belong in a room rather than announce itself as a gadget in one. That instinct exists inside the same company that just shipped a keychain accessory in one shade of grey with a logo dead center, like it needed to remind you it’s tech.

A tracker’s entire job is to sit quietly on the stuff you actually care about. It should feel like something you chose, not something you tolerated because the tech underneath happened to be good. Find Hub integration, UWB precision finding, a battery that lasts a year, all of that is genuinely solid work. But solid engineering wrapped in a logo stamped on steel isn’t a finished product. It’s half of one, and Google, weirdly, is the company with the least excuse for stopping there.

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Camera Batteries Go Missing, So This $70 One Tracks Itself

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Camera batteries are one of those accessories that photographers never think about until something goes wrong. They’re small enough to vanish into the bottom of a bag or a jacket pocket, common enough to own several of and regularly mix up, and important enough that losing one mid-trip can force an early stop to a shoot. The solution most people reach for is buying more of them, which only increases the number of things to keep track of.

The FALCAM TagBatt addresses the problem from inside the battery itself. Compatible with Sony’s NP-FZ100 form factor, it integrates Apple’s Find My tracking technology directly into the cell, so the battery carries its own location data wherever it goes. If it ends up left behind at a studio, a venue, or the seat pocket of a flight, the Find My app will flag it and show its last known position.

Designer: FALCAM

Because the tracker lives inside the battery rather than clipped to a camera strap or screwed into a cage mount, it’s considerably harder to spot. An opportunistic thief who grabs a camera bag and removes any obvious Bluetooth puck from the outside can’t strip out what’s already built into the power source. It’s the kind of discreet integration that external trackers can’t quite replicate, no matter how small they get.

The tracking isn’t the only thing the TagBatt changes about how a camera battery behaves. A built-in USB-C port lets it charge directly from any standard USB-C source, including a power bank or a travel adapter, without needing the dedicated Sony battery charger that typically takes up its own space in a kit bag. Pop it out of the camera, plug it in overnight, and it’s ready in the morning without routing around a charger at all.

Capacity comes in at 2,600mAh against the OEM Sony NP-FZ100’s 2,280mAh, which translates to a modest but real advantage per charge. An advanced decoding chip handles the communication with the camera’s internal systems so the body treats it as it would any genuine battery, with accurate charge-level reporting and none of the “non-genuine battery” warning messages that typically accompany third-party cells.

Compatibility covers a wide sweep of Sony’s current lineup, including the Alpha 7 series through the Alpha 7 V, the Alpha 9 series, the Alpha 6700, the FX3 and FX30, and the ZV-E1, among others. A Canon LP-E6 version is also available now, with Nikon EN-EL15 and Fujifilm NP-W235 versions confirmed to be in development.

At $69.99, the TagBatt costs more than a standard third-party replacement but considerably less than the Sony original, and it comes with two capabilities that the original simply doesn’t offer. For photographers who travel frequently, work in locations where gear occasionally goes astray, or are just tired of carrying a charger they’d rather leave at home, the trade-off makes a fairly straightforward case.

The post Camera Batteries Go Missing, So This $70 One Tracks Itself first appeared on Yanko Design.

Motorola just debuted its AirTag Killer with Android-compatible tracking and a clever extra feature

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Motorola just announced its Android-based device tracker, and I’m sure if you saw it too, you’d have the same thoughts as I did. It looks very familiar… Almost too familiar. Modeled precisely on Apple’s AirTag, the Moto Tag is a tiny tracking device that works within the Android OS, allowing you to effectively and accurately track your belongings. When I first saw the Moto Tag, I found myself feeling a familiar sense of smugness at the fact that an Android company copied Apple (they did with the removal of the headphone jack, with the camera notch)… but then I remembered that the inverse is also true. The WWDC event was pretty much Apple announcing Android-like features for the iPhone, and rebranding Artificial Intelligence to Apple Intelligence. The catch there was that Apple took its sweet time to implement these features, but also did a better job. If you extend that benefit of doubt the other way, it becomes a lot easier to appreciate the Moto Tag for what it brings to the table.

Designer: Motorola

Like the AirTag, the Moto Tag is a small, circular disc slightly larger than a quarter. It boasts a user-replaceable CR2032 battery that Motorola claims will last a full year on a single charge. While it lacks a built-in keyring loop (there’s a clever reason why it copies the AirTag so shamelessly), it integrates seamlessly with the revamped Google Find My Device network. This ensures easy pairing with countless Android smartphones, allowing users to locate and even make the Moto Tag play a sound for easier retrieval.

Looking towards the future, Motorola has equipped the Moto Tag with ultrawideband (UWB) technology. This paves the way for “precision tracking,” a feature that will provide detailed on-screen instructions for finding the tracker when you’re in close proximity. While similar to Apple’s Precision Finding with AirTags, this functionality currently awaits an update to Google’s Find My Device network.

However, the Moto Tag boasts a unique feature that sets it apart: a built-in button. This button, cleverly placed where the “M” of the Motorola logo sits, can be pressed to make your paired smartphone ring. This comes in handy in those moments when you’ve misplaced your phone but have the Moto Tag within reach.

The multi-functionality doesn’t stop there. The button can also be used to trigger the camera shutter or recording button on Motorola phones, or any Android phone for that matter, making capturing content on the go a breeze. Finally, the Moto Tag is IP67 rated for dust, water, and dirt resistance, ensuring it can withstand everyday bumps and spills without compromising its tracking abilities.

But before you bash Motorola for being unimaginative or blatantly copying a product’s shape and size, there truly IS a clever reason why Motorola probably chose to make their tracking device look almost exactly like their competitor. Apple’s AirTag already has a flourishing accessory ecosystem. From holders and hangers to carabiners and even stickers that let you attach your AirTag to the inner lining of suitcases and laptop bags, the AirTag has no shortage of accessories to accompany it… and by copying the AirTag’s form factor, Motorola’s ensured absolute compatibility of every one of these accessories with the Moto Tag too. It’s genius, to leverage your competitor’s success to boost your own product. Isn’t it?!

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The AirTag that Apple should have built: Nomad’s GPS tracking card comes with Apple ‘Find My’ support

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It’s the size of a credit card, fits in your wallet, works with Apple’s Find My network, and most importantly, charges wirelessly so you don’t need to worry about batteries or ditching the entire device altogether after a year of use. Meet the Nomad Tracking Card, a slick tracking device that makes you wonder why Apple made something as bulky as the AirTag. At just 2mm thin, it’s about as thick as 2 credit cards together, making it discreet enough to slip in anywhere, whether it’s your wallet, your backpack, or even your jacket pocket, giving you the ability to track your belongings through Apple’s global device tracking network.

Designer: Nomad

Anyone who knows me knows how much I think the AirTag needs a redesign. Apple made the tracking device back in 2019 to be used with bags and keys, but didn’t think of the potential of having a card-shaped tracker for your wallet and pockets. It’s been 5 years since the AirTag made its first appearance and rumors about an AirTag 2.0 are so few and far apart, it’s almost as if Apple’s left it up to third party creators to make better trackers that work with its devices.

That’s where Nomad’s Tracking Card comes in. It’s slim, compact, and manages to fit an impressive amount of tech inside its design. The card sports a polycarbonate body, known for its toughness and impact resistance, and comes with a GPS tracker, an NFC for pairing, a battery that runs for 5 months on a full charge, and a MagSafe-compatible wireless charging coil that lets you charge your card when its battery runs out. A graphic on the card tells you where the wireless coil is located, so you can simply attach the Tracking Card onto a MagSafe charger or place it on a wireless charging mat and it begins recharging. No replaceable batteries, no single-use design, no wastage.

Nomad’s website doesn’t mention the presence of a built-in speaker like you would have with the AirTag. Useful for being able to ‘hear’ where your tracking device is, or for alerting you if stolen or left behind, the speaker can be quite a nifty feature. The Tracking Card is, however, IPX7 water and dust-proof, and starts at $40.

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Chipolo announces “Perfectly Imperfect” trackers at CES 2024 that are as visually unique as you are

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Automation almost always means the death of imperfection. The reason we have robots manufacturing products is because not only is it faster, robots are much more precise than humans, resulting in the kind of consistency we’ve come to expect from the Industrial Age. In a world hyper-focused on sheer perfection, Chipolo is embracing the flawed with its latest release at CES 2024, the limited edition “Perfectly Imperfect” Chipolo CARD Spot, exclusively compatible with the Apple Find My network.

Designer: Chipolo

The brand has launched 10,000 of these unique item trackers, each with its own minor cosmetic imperfection, a bold move that’s more than just a marketing strategy — it’s a statement. Chipolo is challenging the pervasive societal norms dictating that perfection is paramount, suggesting instead that these so-called “defects” are often barely noticeable to others and might be unduly magnified in our own eyes.

Primož Zelenšek, Co-founder, and CEO of Chipolo, expressed his excitement about the launch, stating, “Through the ‘Perfectly Imperfect’ series, we aim to ease lives not just physically through functionality but also mentally, by promoting peace of mind.” This initiative isn’t just about producing unique trackers; it’s about inspiring a change in how people view themselves and their imperfections.

What sets these Chipolo CARD Spot trackers apart is not just their philosophy but also their design. Each tracker features a distinctive blemish on one side and the campaign’s motto, “Perfectly Imperfect,” engraved on the other in a marker-like font developed in collaboration with a female-owned type design studio in Slovenia. This choice in typography reflects the brand’s core values of friendliness and openness and supports the campaign’s message that our imperfections contribute to our uniqueness.

To ensure that this ‘imperfection’ isn’t just a gimmick but is more of a well-rounded message on sustainability, Chipolo has chosen to use plastic with minor imperfections that would typically be discarded, thereby reducing waste and avoiding the creation of additional pollution. This choice underlines Chipolo’s commitment to the environment, ensuring that each tracker is fully functional, with only its exterior bearing the marks of its sustainable journey. It also isn’t the first time Chipolo’s relied on recycled plastic, as the company debuted a series of trackers made from repurposed ocean plastic back in 2020.

Keeping in line with the campaign’s overall message, the company has partnered with The Global Mental Health Peer Network, Hilfsgemeinschaft der Blinden und Sehschwachen Österreichs, and VDC Zasavje, promising to donate $1 for every “Perfectly Imperfect” Chipolo sold. This partnership aims to support the missions of these non-profits, focusing on mental health, support for the blind and visually impaired, and social welfare, respectively.

As these limited edition trackers make their way into pockets and purses worldwide, they carry with them a message of acceptance, sustainability, and community support. Sometimes, it’s about discovering a sense of acceptance and peace within ourselves — and that’s something worth searching for.

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