Nokia Treasure Tag – as a pet finder – pretty cool if you can connect

I remembered the first time my cat disappeared I thought of using the Nokia treasure tag mini to find him. Alas, when I eventually got that to connect I realised there was no point as it was the most useless bluetooth product ever – what could it do? I can’t locate it when it’s missing. All it can do is tell me when I’ve gotten some distance from it.

On Saturday night the cat went missing again (within the house – it’s a big student house so lots of places to hide) and thought, yeah, if I had that Nokia Treasure Tag, I could make it bleep to find the cat in the house. The original has has NFC (for easier connection – no removing battery just to connect) and speaker so you can make it bleep. Some thought it might be harsh on the cat but the bleep sound isn’t that loud and for the brief moment I got it to work, he kinda liked it and associated the bleep with coming towards me. When I say brief, I mean a couple of minutes.

Comes with another band without the loop bit in case you just wanted to drop it in a bag. The instructions sheet isn’t the most useful.

It took a long time to get it to connect to my 1520 on W10. It doesn’t even connect to my housemate’s 1520 on 8.1. Reports online for the app on the WP store are a mixed bag, with the negative reviews indicating that it either never connects or constantly disconects. Over on Twitter, Andy Wilson said it disconnected even when the attached item was just in his pocket. To give benefit of the doubt, there have been users that say it works fine. Also on twitter, Adrian Hughes told us his Treasure Tag worked fine on Denim.

Should it actually work, it’s actually pretty cool as a pet finder.

• Light and small – doesn’t weight down the pet. Mini was smaller but was also useless for this purpose.
• Looks like a regular pet name tag
• Bleeps the moment your pet gets out of range. Your phone also bleeps to let you know.
• Can activate it to bleep from your phone so you can manually locate the cat by a pseudo-echo-location.

Supposedly this could be used as a remote shutter for Lumia Selfie. Didn’t manage to get that going. It should also leave a GPS location for the last time it was connected. The mini did that on my Note 4. This connects to my Note 4 but does nothing afterwards (just spinning load icon). But even if it did, I’ve never used a phone with such an abysmal battery life before unless I turn pretty much everything off (location, bluetooth, LTE, background data, lower brightness, screen vibration, certain apps :/). Other things that would be nice would be longer connection distance and if possible, connection remotely over bluetooth (and not having to connect with the tag in your hand – otherwise when you disconnect, you can never reconnect unless it’s next to you).

I just find it super annoying when the primary purpose of a product can’t be achieved. So much premise but it turns out to be a bag of fail. Will give it 48 hours till I consider returning it to Amazon. Or perhaps just keep it as a Nokia logo on my cat tag. :/

It gives the most annoying hints and tips when you can’t connect like “Your phone can’t connect to this tag. You may be too far away from it, or there may be something interfering with the connection. Try moving around to connect the tag”. You’re literally touching the tag. The WiFi is off. There’s no interference.

Update: after some multiple resets it is asking for an update that supposedly gives a more reliable connection.

Update: I can actually connect to it. Let’s see if it stays connected.

Update Day 1: Still seems to be connected so the new app firmware update helped. I wish it presented itself the moment the app opened rather than waiting for me to reset the tag 5 times. Well it works well now.

Update Day 2: Still having connection issues. Reset tag and restarted phone twice. Not sure if it was phone this time as NFC just stopped working on 1520. Actually shortly after finally connecting it decides to disconnect again. If I complain and say it doesn’t work it works. If I praise it and say it works it disconnects.

Category: Nokia, Windows Phone