STOP LOSING EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW

Has your handbag, keys or luggage gone AWOL? You won’t need to spend hours looking for lost stuff if you can put an inexpensive Bluetooth tracker on the case.

NEW NOW NEXT | There’s a new luxury handbag in town and it’s vying for the affections of those who would shell out $1300 for Louis Vuitton’s legendary Neverfull or $1,000 for 3.1 Phillip Lim’s Pashli satchel.

Mezzi matches its high-end competitors for quality and beauty and then goes one step further by packing tracker technology inside its handbags, briefcases and totes. It’s difficult to permanently misplace a Mezzi because each one features a “seamlessly integrated MEZZI Trackr allowing wireless connectivity” between it and your smartphone.

Now that’s a great idea; but really, you don’t need to buy a Mezzi handbag if its just its tracker technology that you want. You can make each and every one of your existing handbags (or your luggage, laptop, keys, whatever) Mezzi smart for as little as $18 with one of the new wave of tiny, inexpensive Bluetooth tracking devices.

HOW TRACKER TECHNOLOGY WORKS

A tracker is a battery-operated Bluetooth-enabled tag, rarely larger than a quarter, which can be attached to any object you want to trace. It delivers wireless location-based services to your smartphone or computer via a companion app that communicates with the tag.

WHAT THE BEST TRACKERS CAN DO

When you leave a tagged item behind but don’t know where you’ve left it, your phone or electronic device can locate it. If the item is relatively close by, your phone can guide you to it. If it’s farther afield, the app can tell you the last place it was situated near your phone.

If your item is a long way gone, tracker apps use “crowd GPS” to help you find it. If—and this is a big if because these products are still in their infancy—anyone anywhere with the same app that you have walks by your item, his or her electronic device will send a location finder to yours.

The best trackers have replaceable batteries and a button on them to help you find your phone even when the ringer is off.

FINDING THE PERFECT TRACKER

The tracker category is heating up with plenty of products to choose from including PROTAG Duet, Tile, TrackR Bravo, Pebblebee, HipKey, Chipolo, LassoTag Beacon, etc.

Too bad I didn’t have David Pogue’s Video Review before I bought my Tile trackers last November. His assessment of the category and review of individual products is very informative. —Carolann Rule