Follow-up review: Comparison of Moto Tag, Tile, Airtags, and Samsung Smarttag

There are often significant differences in functionality between the seemingly similar item-finding tags.

Erik Mörner

Published 23 February 2025 - 16:03

Question: Hello the test of Moto Tag was a very interesting article. I have had a Tile for many years. It would have been very interesting if this was also compared in a find-comparison. But here I would perhaps like to try a place a bit more outside the city centre.

Even the other finders like chippotle and bumebelbee or whatever they are called would have been fun to see evaluated. Very good article!

Erik Mörner answers: Hello, thank you. Yes, I read another test of Moto Tag before and was amazed that they had not evaluated the possibilities of actually finding a lost item. I had a Tile, one you can't change the battery on, which I left at a recycling station a couple of months ago. So then I could follow the position for a longer time and even though it wasn't in exactly the same place where I now left the tags, my feeling then was that Tile loses range and is probably a bit worse than Moto/Google is today. It's not possible to compare directly because it was in another less trafficked place in Södermalm, but then it could take many hours before the position was updated.

If one assumes that the distribution of users is even between city and countryside, then central measurements should give the same result, so that in less densely populated areas you get the same order, but just have to wait longer to get the result. Then, of course, there is always a certain degree of randomness depending on where you measure and who happens to be there at that time.

The results for, for example, Chipolo & Pebblebee are the same as for Apple's AirTags or Moto Tag because they use the same network.

In January, I took the opportunity to bring AirTags, Moto Tag, Tile, and Samsung Smarttag when I travelled to Xiaomi's launch and put them all in my bag that I checked in. Generally, one can say that AirTag is the best and Tile the worst. I suspect that Tile is constantly losing as they lose users.

Used the tags on site in Prague, flew via Warsaw to Arlanda and there is always a certain degree of randomness involved. Just when I landed at Arlanda, all four found my luggage immediately after I got off the plane. In Prague, Tile was the slowest, when the others found every quarter of an hour or more often, it could take over an hour between updates for Tile. In Warsaw at the airport, Tile was also the slowest with the updates.