Samsung Unpacked: Tile CEO says SmartThings tracker ‘validates’ category

You might be a little miffed to see a massive multinational copying one of your products, but the CEO of Tile reckons it will be good for business.

If you were the CEO of a company that only makes one kind of product, you might be a little worried to hear one of the biggest companies in the world was about to start competing with you. But the head of Tile has welcomed the challenge from Samsung.

The latter announced this morning that it will start selling smart tracking tags that use Bluetooth and Ultra Wideband technology to help you keep track of your keys, pets or pretty much anything else you stick one of the tags onto.

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Samsung revealed the Galaxy Smart Tag at its Unpacked event on Friday morning.

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Tile has been making these tags and an associated app for almost a decade now, and its CEO CJ Prober is glad to see the competition.

“For nearly a decade, Tile has worked to pioneer a category focused on leveraging technology to solve the universal pain point of finding lost or misplaced things,” Mr Prober said.

“Today’s announcement further validates this category and will drive interest in the innovative solutions we have developed that make Tile products a clear choice for consumers.

“We welcome fair competition, and look forward to continuing to deliver best-in-class products to new and existing customers,” Mr Prober added.

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A Tile brand Bluetooth tracker tag.

The Tile Bluetooth tracker on a set of car keys.

It’s not Samsung’s first crack at a location tracker tag.

In 2018 the company brought out the SmartThings tracker, which used GPS and cloud connectivity to track items.

It was more expensive than Tile’s trackers and also required you to pay for cellular data after the first year.

The new Samsung trackers make use of Bluetooth and the emerging Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology, a short-range, high-bandwidth radio technology that has recently been added to some of the fancier smartphones.

Tile is reportedly working on a tracker that uses UWB too.

Unlike Samsung’s new tracker, which uses the company’s SmartThings platform, Tile is also platform agnostic, so you can use it on any Android or iPhone device.