Earlier this year HP and Tile introduced the first laptop to feature a built-in Tile tracker that would help you track down your computer should it go missing. Now Tile has announced a partnership with Intel that could bring the technology to far more laptops in the future.

Tile has made its name for offering a line of Bluetooth trackers that you can attach to a keychain or other small items. If you can’t find your keys, you can fire up the Tile app on your phone and see the last known location on a map to help track them down. Or you can make the Tile tracker ring so that you can use your ears to figure out which couch cushions to dig under. There’s also optional support for a community feature that leverages other nearby Tile users’ devices to help you locate items that are out of your phone’s range.

Building Tile technology into a laptop means that you don’t need to attach a third-party tracker to it to use Tile’s location tracking services. And unlike existing Tile devices, you don’t have to worry about replacing the battery (or tracker) once a year — Tile’s integrated laptop trackers can draw power from a laptop battery, but they also hold a bit of power in reserve so they should work even when the laptop is sleeping, powered down, or out of juice entirely — or at least that’s how the HP DragonFly Elite’s optional Tile tracker feature works.

In a press release announcing Tile’s partnership with Intel, the company only promises that Tile will work when “the device is in sleep mode,” so it’s possible that you may be out of luck if the laptop battery is entirely dead.

The partnership doesn’t mean that all Intel-powered laptops will feature Tile tracking features. But Tile says the new solutions should “be available later this year for OEM adoption,” suggesting it’ll be up to PC makers to decide whether to incorporate Tile’s trackers with its computers… and I suspect that in many cases it’ll be an optional feature that customers can choose to pay extra for.

 

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3 replies on “Tile and Intel partner to help you find your missing laptops”

  1. This is a feature that I’d expect to be wanted in business laptops.
    For personal laptops, it’s useless. If anything, I’d want to use the laptop to find my other stuff. Which am I more likely to lose, a laptop or a phone? So the laptop constantly having this turned on even while it’s asleep means it’s just announcing to anything around it that it’s there.
    I hope at least they’ll let you turn it off.

    1. You should be able to do that too — Tile introduced a new Windows 10 app earlier this year that lets you search for other Tile devices from your laptop. You’ll still need to invest in Tile hardware for your keys, phone cases, or other devices though.

    2. The Laptop Tile Tracker uses the laptop battery, but the laptop does not have to be on.
      You can already locate any Windows 10 laptop that is on as long as you enable Location Services and add it to Microsoft Device Management without buying this.

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