Product Reviews

Finding things you misplace can take a long time out of a day, is at best irritating and, if it's the keys to your house or car, can mean being late for or missing an appointment. You can make life easier by being systematic and having set places for important things such as your phone, iPod, bag or domestic animal, but it's still easy to be caught out. Loc8tor Lite aims to help.

The idea is simple enough and works in a similar way to the RFID tags supermarkets keep threatening to use for stock control. You attach a small transponder to the object that gets lost and have a transmitter to find it with. In the case of the Loc8tor Lite, the transponder is about the size and shape of a boiled sweet - think Murray Mint, rather than Tic Tac.

You then have a transmitter that sends a signal to activate the transponder when you start a search. The Loc8tor is the size of a credit card, but about 6mm thick. The transmitter has a column of eight LEDs up its centre and these illuminate red, yellow and green as you get closer to the transponder and its attached object.

At the same time, both transmitter and transponder emit a series of beeps, so you can hear the lost object while the transmitter emits higher and

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higher pitched beeps the closer you get, rather like with the proximity parking detector in a car.

In practice, the system works pretty well. We found transponders hidden in a house by keen third parties from two or three rooms away, although you do have to remember the system works in three-dimensional space, so you can get a strong signal in a downstairs room when the transponder's upstairs above it. Loc8tor claims a range of 122m, but that's in ideal conditions. With bricks and mortar - and especially with stone walls - the range can be heavily attenuated.

The Loc8tor Lite comes with one transmitter and two transponders, so you can keep a radio frequency eye on two things at once. You can buy an extra two transponders for £25 and all four can be paired with the same transmitter in much the same way that you pair a Bluetooth headset with a phone. There's a macho version of the Loc8tor for the terminally harebrained, which can keep track of up to 24 objects at once, and a business version, where you can register up to 6000.

The main disadvantage we can see with the device is the size of the transponder. It may not sound big, and attaching a Murray Mint to your iPhone or iPod case via the supplied, key fob-style elastic or a sticky pad is probably okay. It looks pretty naff attached to a pair of glasses, though, as it would on most pieces of clothing.

Running costs are just the batteries, with the button cells in the tags lasting about eight months and the one in the transmitter being dependent on frequency of use. The only other possible problem is losing the transmitter, so there's a slide-in bracket to attach it to a wall or something else large and visible to help prevent this. If you lose things regularly, £45 could be an inexpensive solution to the problem.