After years of speculation, months of delays, and weeks of shipping, the first Bluetooth trackers to support Google’s updated Find My Device network are here. Pebblebee and Chipolo hit the ground running, with shipments of the hotly anticipated wireless locator nodes apparently waiting in the wings.
The Pebblebee Card for Android makes up one-third of the company’s Google FMD-compatible tracker lineup, and sports a credit card-like build that slips easily into small spaces. I’ve spent several days working with one, and while it’s a fine little gadget in its own right, everybody’s pretty much hoping Google will press some magic button and make these work as advertised.
Pebblebee Card for Android
Part of the first wave of Find My Device-compatible Bluetooth trackers, the Pebblebee Card for Android promises precise item finding and a long-lasting battery. It’s only held back from delivering on that first promise by a less-than-stellar initial FMD network implementation, but there’s hope it could improve with time.
- Slim and lightweight
- Rechargeable, but almost never needs charging
- Alarm and Bluetooth radio are both strong
- Google’s network isn’t living up to the hype
- Don’t lose the proprietary charger
Price, availability, and specs
The Pebblebee Card for Android costs $35, the same as the Chipolo Card Point. It comes with a specialized USB-C-to-pogo pin charger that costs $5 to replace should you lose or break it. You’ll save $5 or $20 by ordering a two — or four-pack from the manufacturer, and Pebblebee ships worldwide. Currently, the product is on backorder but is expected to ship in late June or early July.
What’s good about the Pebblebee Card for Android?
Convenient size and reliable Bluetooth radio
First, you’ll notice the sleek form factor. It’s a good bit of engineering and really does feel nearly as slim as a credit card. If you’re tracking something with flat storage like a wallet, purse, or laptop case, it’s the right choice.
The setup was simple and identical to other Pebblebee trackers like the Tag for Android; I turned it on, my phone prompted me to add it to my Google account, and it was immediately findable from anywhere I was logged in. A series of presses and holds of the button inside the center of the Card factory resets it or just turns it off, and one press turns it back on. The battery lasts up to 18 months, and on the rare occasion it needs recharging, the four-LED indicator is easy to read.
Related
Pebblebee Tag for Android review: I couldn’t Find My Device
Google’s new crowdsourced item tracking isn’t ready for primetime
The alarm’s loud for something so thin and works reliably within Bluetooth range. Theoretically (and we hope eventually), you should be able to sound the alarm anywhere it’s near other enrolled Android devices — but we’ll get to that. If you misplace your Card-tracked item in your home, or within Bluetooth range of any Find My Device-enrolled devices linked with your Google account, you’ll have no trouble finding it using the alarm and on-screen proximity sensor.
So far, so good. After all, it’s just a simple transponder that sends an encrypted identifier to the cloud via any Android device that pings it. It really depends on Google’s underlying Find My Device network to work well. And that’s where things start to fall apart.
What’s bad with the Pebblebee Card for Android?
The Card’s fine, but Google’s network needs work
I’ve carried the Pebblebee Card out in public for days, periodically stopping to turn it off, turn on the device it’s paired with, and check the latest location information. My dear, iPhone-using friend Mark even let me try to stalk him for a few days as he walked around the city (the key word there is “try”).
It does actually work a little walking around Lisbon, a moderately dense city with probably somewhere around 70% Android phones. Presumably, that’s enough users to give the network the eyes and ears it needs, since Google tells us the network is fully rolled out in the US and Portugal.
In practice, updates rarely came, and when they did, they lagged by at least an hour and pointed to an almost comically wide search area. More than once, I saw the Find My Device app seemingly change a detection timestamp after the fact, at one point making me think I’d actually left the Card at the park, its only reliably findable location near my home. Apparently, bringing your paired phone into the tracker’s own Bluetooth range doesn’t necessarily ping as a location update, so the app can forget you were just near the tracker.
The Card did ping more in crowded areas, but not consistently. Sometimes walking through a busy Metro terminal got it flagged, sometimes not. Walking past restaurants on touristy streets with hundreds of diners was hit or miss. It pinged both times I took it to the big, modern shopping mall. The underlying hardware and technology appear to work, but not together, often, or well.
“Why not?” is anybody’s guess. Rolling out changes to billions of devices comes with challenges. Maybe it’s various unexpected bugs or an expected period of optimization. At least some of the problem, though, stems from how Google implemented the network’s opt-out status.
Google’s network offers two participation levels. The “in all areas” setting enables the network to locate a tracker, even if your device is the only one to ping it. Apple’s famed Find My network operates that way, based on all iPhones automatically enrolling in that top detection tier.
But almost all Android phones default to the less precise “in high-traffic areas only” setting, which requires “multiple” devices (Google hasn’t specified exactly how many) to ping a tracker, which all then send their location data to Google’s server, where it’s all aggregated and averaged to provide the tracker owner with a notification.
This default setting hamstrings the update frequency and precision of every Android Bluetooth tracker. When the network has to wait for multiple devices to find it, response time suffers greatly. And when it finally does get enough pings to send the tracker’s owner a notification, the aggregated and averaged location data isn’t guaranteed to provide a helpfully precise location.
To be clear, Bluetooth trackers aren’t meant for locating moving objects in real-time, so it wouldn’t be fair to judge Google’s network for failing at that. But when the rare, latent location notification indicates a search area of a roughly 250-meter circle in a relatively dense residential and commercial area, it doesn’t exactly help much if you’re not sure which street, restaurant, corner store, or attraction you lost something at.
Regardless, the network should still work at least a little. Some hiccups are understandable, and I won’t be surprised if the network continues to improve with time. But while the functionality is, for now, disappointing at best, the incredibly stunted long-range tracking isn’t the most ironic part of the FMD network’s launch.
We learned about Google’s device-finding network back in April 2023. It was supposedly ready around Q1 2024, barring delays on a cross-platform unknown tracker alert system. And guess what feature doesn’t work?
I had my iPhone with me during most of my Pebblebee Card testing, SIM card activated, Bluetooth on, and everything completely untouched by any of my Google accounts. I also carried an unlinked Android tablet that was constantly connected to the Internet and sometimes enrolled in the FMD network, sometimes not (although it shouldn’t matter). I did this specifically to test unknown tracker detection.
Nothing. Swing and a miss.
The only time I did get an unknown Bluetooth tracker warning was after sitting at a park café for an hour straight. I stood up to get more coffee, and my daily driver phone — the one the Pebblebee Card was paired with — warned me someone might have tagged me. It offered to sound the device’s alarm, and sure enough, the Card started beeping. The Find My Device network warned me that my own tracker was following me. You can’t make this up.
Should you buy the Pebblebee Card for Android?
The answer’s actually still ‘maybe’
Despite my hand-wringing, all is not lost. Google is obviously aware of the issues and made the following statement.
We are actively working to roll out enhancements to how the Find My Device network operates that will improve the speed and ability of locating lost items over the coming weeks. Devices are continuing to join the new Find My Device network, and we expect the network to grow, which will also help improve lost device findability. We encourage Bluetooth tag owners to change their Find My Device network setting to ‘With network in all areas’ to help improve the network’s ability to find their lost items in lower-traffic areas.
The Card itself, not unlike the Pebblebee Tag, seems like it’s capable of doing what it claims, regardless of the network’s current ability to send timely, accurate notifications. You almost feel bad for the folks behind these trackers, like Google’s hung them out to dry somewhat — after months of waiting to ship their product, an apparently half-baked network implementation’s getting in the way, and it doesn’t seem like Pebblebee’s fault.
However, the FMD network stands a decent chance of improving over the coming months and years, and the Pebblebee Card is also one of just two choices if you want an Android-based Bluetooth tracker in this svelte form factor right now. And it works just fine for finding devices within the range of phones it’s paired with. You can’t and shouldn’t expect GPS-level tracking, because that’s not what Bluetooth trackers do. And if Google decides to push some fixes or possibly massage its network finding opt-out settings, someday trackers like the Pebblebee Card for Android could rival the vaunted AirTag.
Just don’t buy it with the expectation it’ll help you find things misplaced across the city yet, let alone around the world. We hope it can someday, though.
Pebblebee Card for Android
The Pebblebee Card for Android is a good piece of equipment, and if Google’s Find My Device network sees some significant improvements, it could someday work almost as well as Apple’s famous AirTags.
