Tile Sticker Teardown

Tile makes three main tracker products — the Tile Slim for wallets, the Tile Mate for keychains, and the Tile Sticker — all with the same functionality and requirements but with different form factors. They’re all impressively small in their own way, while including a lot of features that aren’t easy to achieve at such a small size, like Bluetooth, 3-year battery life (non-replaceable), a speaker, and IP68 waterproofing.

Looking at the dimensions, you can see they’re quite small:

• Slim: 54 x 86 x 3 mm
• Mate: 38 x 38 x 7 mm
• Sticker: 28 x 28 x 8 mm

I wanted to learn about how to make tiny, rugged electronics, and it was very helpful to compare these three otherwise identical products to see how different decisions were made based on form factor. This first teardown focuses in on the Tile Sticker.

The Tile Sticker is fairly simple: enclosure, board, battery, speaker, button, and the adhesive sticker. But it features some interesting and unexpected design choices.

Stay tuned to this series as I make my way through the other two trackers!

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