If you’re a mad scientist, a comically forgetful sitcom attorney, or in some other way prone to misplacing your things, you might benefit from investing in a gadget that’s designed to alert you when you start walking away without your phone, wallet, or keys.

st don’t bother investing in the Duet. ke so many other doodad-trackers out there, this small chiclet of brightly colored plastic is essentially a buddy system for keeping track of your items. It also syncs up with your Android device using Bluetooth. kewise, you leave your keys behind with the Duet attached to them, your phone will alert you that you’re missing something.

In the case of the Duet, the obvious comparison is with Tile—both have a similar shape both were financed by successful crowdfunding campaigns. otag, which makes the Duet, also makes two larger models of tracking devices: the Elite the G1. The Duet is their smallest offering it’s designed to either dangle from a keychain or slip inside a wallet. 

The Duet comes with an adhesive sticker to attach it to flat items, like a laptop, as well as a keyring dongle. Mine arrived with the keychain woven through the side, which made the back casing difficult to close; you might have to restring yours, too. The Duet is also powered by a CR2016 coin battery, which lasts about six months. It conveniently comes with two extra batteries in the box, so you could go about a year a half before you have to remember to buy a battery for this thing.

The otag app isn’t terribly functional. There have been numerous complaints about the app’s finicky location data performance, as well several instances where users complained that the app would place their stuff as far as Africa.

Indeed, when I closed the app then reopened it, it opened in “crowdsourced” mode, telling me there were four other users reporting items that were lost overseas. (Good luck with your lost stuff?)

On the flip side, the app can keep track of up to 10 Duet devices, you can set -Fi Safe Zones that are exempt from alarms so that the tracker isn’t beeping at you all the time when you’re at home or in the office. 

An inconsistent utility 

My main gripe with the Duet is that it’s inconsistent. For instance, the first time I walked away from my stuff, I didn’t hear or feel any alerts from the Duet in my pocket. Then, when I walked from the living room to the kitchen back, roughly 25 seconds after I’d returned the Duet started beeping to warn me that I’d walked away from my belongings, even though I’d already returned to them. One time I even made it down the stairs, out the front door, up the walkway before I received a notification that I’d left my keys behind.

To be fair, otag does say there can be a 10-17 second delay in alarm triggers, but that’s just enough time for someone to snag your stuff if you accidentally leave it out in a public place.

l around, I was unimpressed with Duet. You can’t expect a $30 gizmo that’s barely bigger than three stacked quarters to have stellar battery life a million features, but what’s there just didn’t work reliably. Sure, it’s easy to set up, straightforward to use, utilizes a common, replaceable battery, but it didn’t always work the way it was supposed to.