Accessories
Kensington Proximo Review: Find Your iPhone, Find Your Stuff
The Kensington Proximo is a new iPhone accessory that pairs with multiple trackers to help you find your iPhone, find your keys and find your stuff… and hopefully prevent you from losing it in the first place.
Proximo is one of many new app-enabled accessories that combine a hardware accessory with an app on the iPhone. Like many of these devices, it connects via Bluetooth 4.0 to track your items.
The Proximo comes with two small fobs, one designed to connect to a pair of keys and the other to tuck into a bag or purse.
The Kensington Proximo tracks your stuff and the iPhone.
These small fobs connect to the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4S and sound an alert on the iPhone when a user walks too far away from them. Users can control how sensitive the range is, from keeping items right next to them to within the same home or office.
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The iPhone app allows users to find these fobs with a push of the button, sounding a tone on either fob as long as it is in range of Bluetooth. During our time with the Proximo, we found it is large enough to stay connected in a 1,500 square foot house, even through walls and when a fob is in a bag in the basement.
Track and find the iPhone or fobs.
If a fob is out of range, the app won’t be able to sound an alarm, but it can pull up the GPS coordinates of when it was last shown. This is where the Proximo really shines. Say you’re out running errands all day and stop to work somewhere, leaving behind a purse or backpack. If you miss the proximo notification, you can still see where it last saw the bag. It cannot actively track the fobs once they are out of range, but it will pull up the GPS location from where it was last connected, narrowing down your search.
Here, we tracked down our keys to the Best Buy parking lot.
The keyfob can also be used to find the iPhone, turning the volume up and sounding a loud alarm, a handy feature to have in addition to the standard Find my iPhone app.
We used the Proximo app and fobs during the holiday season to make sure we didn’t forget to bring a bag or keys with us when leaving a relative’s house. The fobs are easy to pair and it’s handy to toss the smaller fob in a bag.
The only issue we had with the fobs and our iPhone is that when the app is using Bluetooth to track the fobs were unable to pair the iPhone with SYNC in our Ford Fusion. Turning off the background tracking fixed this issue, but meant we couldn’t track the fobs. Kensington is looking into this issue.
This small fob is perfect for a bag or purse.
If you constantly misplace your iPhone, bags or keys, Proximo is a great way to keep track of your stuff, and can even help you track it down after leaving it at a store or coffee shop.
Proximo can track up to five fobs, and includes 2 in the Proximo Starter kit which retails for $59.99. Extra fobs retail for $24.99. Pre-orders start on Amazon and Kensington on January 8th.
metaphorce
02/18/2013 at 11:15 pm
This review is extremely confusingly written. Kensington refer to these two devices by different names: one is called a fob, but the other is called a tag. I read the Kensington stuff enough to know that the tags help you track other objects with your phone, where the fob is supposed to help you locate your phone by activating the fob. (If you misplace both, you’re SOL.) I read your review hoping to find out how well the fob worked at finding the phone, but since you refer to both devices as “fobs” your review is pretty incomprehensible and, for my query, useless.
Paul is unhappy
03/10/2013 at 6:26 pm
I have one of these and it is useless. Even on the least sensitive setting the phone and the fobs lose contact with each other simply when they are in different pockets. If you use the fob as a key ring you can’t even put them down in one room and walk to another.
Kensington offer no solution. This is simply not worth buying, you will be so fed up of false alarms that you will have switched it off within a couple of days.
Jozef
08/19/2013 at 5:00 pm
I agree with Paul.
The app on the iPhone is continuously searching for the fob, however pressing the button on the fob sounds alarm on the iPhone. This happens even if the fob and the iPhone are few centimeters apart.