Better than the Moto Tag?

It took years for Google to launch its answer to Apple’s AirTag and its successful Find My network, but now that the Find My Device network is here, a lot of companies are jumping on board to make compatible Bluetooth trackers. Chipolo and Pebblebee were some of the first, but more companies have joined them since, including Motorola with its excellent Moto Tag.

Chipolo is back again with its next-gen tracker, the POP ($29 on Amazon or on Chipolo’s website). This time, it aims to beat both Pebblebee and the Moto Tag at their own game. Like Pebblebee’s latest universal trackers, the POP is compatible with both Apple and Google’s networks, and like the Moto Tag, it offers a standalone app with extra functionality. It doesn’t have an ultrawideband chip (UWB), but it does have Bluetooth 6.0, which opens up the door for more precise finding. I’ve been testing it for over a week, so let me tell you what I think about it.

Looking at the POP, I was hard-pressed to notice any difference with Chipolo’s previous trackers. In the image above, POP is green, while black is the ONE Spot (Apple Find My), white is ONE Point (Google Find My Network), and red is the regular ONE (Chipolo’s app on both iOS and Android). The POP comes in six colors, too — white, black, green, yellow, red, and blue — so it’s hard not to confuse these. But the dot above the logo sticks out on the POP; it’s carved into the older models.

Minor esthetic differences aside, the POP’s uniqueness is more internal and in its extra functionality. As I said, it’s compatible with both Apple’s and Google’s networks, just like Pebblebee’s universal trackers. You have to reset the tracker to move from one network to another, so you can’t use it on both of them simultaneously. But if you want a tracker that works with your Android phone today and your potential iPhone next year without locking you into one ecosystem, this and the Pebblebees are the most versatile choice for now.

There’s still a CR2032 battery inside, which should last about a year. Given my experience with previous Chipolo trackers with the same battery, that tracks out. I usually need to upgrade the battery around the 11-13 month mark — a year if we’re averaging things out. The keyring hole is still there for extra convenience, too. The Bluetooth range has been upgraded to 90 meters instead of 60 on the previous ONE Point, and the tracker is now IP55-rated with certified dust resistance versus the IPX5 from earlier Chipolo trackers.

But perhaps the biggest hardware upgrade is the move to Bluetooth 6.0, which brings support for Channel Sounding for more accurate distance measurement between phones and the tag — potentially. It’s not UWB (there’s no directional finding), but it should tell you exactly how far the tracker is and do it more accurately than the current range finder does with Bluetooth 5. It’ll obviously require both a compatible Bluetooth 6.0 phone (more phones are now launching with it) as well as Google and Apple to add it into their Find My/Find My Device spec. Once those stars are aligned, the POP should be nearly as good as the Moto Tag with its potential UWB support. I’d have preferred a UWB chip, personally, but Bluetooth 6.0 is a decent — and potentially more universal — compromise.

Like Motorola did with the Moto Tag, Chipolo has elected to augment the POP’s features through its own app. Currently, both Apple and Google’s Find apps offer very limited functionality, which restricts a lot of trackers from offering features that independent tags like the Samsung Galaxy SmartTag2 and Tile trackers can offer.

So I set up the Chipolo POP in Find My Device on my Pixel 9 Pro and then received a pop-up asking me to install the Chipolo app. The POP was immediately detected in the app, and with it came a bunch of extra features: software updates, ringtone options, phone calling, camera control, and most importantly, out-of-range alerts.

After agreeing to several permissions, I started testing these. The entire POP tracker is a button that can be double-pressed to ring my phone. Finally, my tracker can help me find my phone instead of just the other way around! This is pretty similar to the Moto Tag’s functionality, but Moto lets your adjust the phone’s ringing volume, while Chipolo lets you flash the phone’s flashlight to see it in the dark. Good for people with hearing disabilities.

Out-of-range alerts are the most interesting feature, though, and the one that differentiates between the new Chipolo POP and all other Find My Device-compatible trackers; even the Moto Tag doesn’t offer this. I purposefully left my keys at home a few times, and like clockwork, each time I walked out, I got a notification from the Chipolo app reminding me about them within a minute. It’s as reliable as Samsung’s and Tile’s notification, and faster than Apple’s even. The only missing bit is that it doesn’t seem to offer safe places. So if I attach the POP to my backpack, knowing I don’t take the backpack with me every time I leave home, I’d still get notified about it. Samsung, Tile, and Apple’s Find My network offer safe places, by comparison.

Besides these, I was able to choose my tracker’s ringtone among 12 options (more than the Moto Tag’s four), and set it up as a camera shutter. But the latter only works in the camera built into the Chipolo app and only for selfies. Motorola requires more permission and accessibility access, but it can integrate its Moto Tag’s remote shutter button with my Pixel’s default camera app.

If you’ve read any of my Find My Device experiments in the past few months, you already know what’s coming. If not, you can either spend a few hours with a cup of coffee reading about why I don’t think Google’s finding network is solid enough (I’ve been comparing this network against Apple’s, Samsung’s, and Tile’s for the better part of a year now) or just trust me when I say that Google’s network is just unreliable.

It’s gotten better since I last wrote about it — I won’t deny that — but it still blanks out completely sometimes, even with many Android devices nearby. Sometimes, it won’t even realize a tag is right next to it. I still maintain that Samsung has a more solid network for Android users, even if it’s officially limited to Samsung phones. Google has a lot of work to do to solidify its network’s reliability, especially in less dense areas or after several hours of disconnections. Until it does, all of these trackers come with an asterisk: Buy at your own risk, with the hope of something better down the line.

This is no fault of Chipolo, and the POP is as solid a tracker as I have seen. I’d put it right next to the Moto Tag in my tests, and honestly, if you’re going to use it with Apple’s Find My, you should have no reservations whatsoever. If you have an Android phone, though, I recommend you weigh your options. For Samsung phone owners, the Galaxy SmartTag2 is still a no-brainer; everyone else should either wait a bit to make sure Google’s network is becoming more reliable or take a gamble on it.

If you do, you can opt for the rechargeable battery of the Pebblebee Universal trackers which lacks any extra functionality, pick the Moto Tag for its potentially upcoming UWB support and dash of extra functions (while knowing you can never switch it to Apple’s network), or go for the Chipolo POP ($29 on Amazon or on Chipolo’s website). It’s universal across Apple and Android and has tons of extra functionality, but it only offers distance finding through Bluetooth 6.0 and it has a removable rechargeable battery. For me, the compromise is worth it, if only for the out-of-range left-behind reminder alerts.