Whenever we lose something, one of our first reactions is to ask people for help. We frequently believe in relations and friends, sometimes even strangers, within the look for lost property. Crowdsourcing has become more common on the web today, a minimum of when it involves asking questions or recommendations. that sort of social-based solution has begun to also become trendy in item tracking circles, and Samsung’s SmartThings Find adding a replacement Members service that essentially turns it into a social network.
SmartThings Find has become Samsung‘s answer to Apple’s Find My network and even Android’s more generic Find My Device. With the addition of the new Galaxy SmartTag and SmartTag+, Samsung has also entered the tracker space once dominated by the likes of Tile. Unsurprisingly, Samsung is additionally jumping on the recent trend that crowdsources the look for a missing item and is expanding it into a more formal social network.
Traditionally, you’ll locate a lost smartphone using some Web tool, but that only works with the last known phone location supported when it last connected to the web. Item trackers like Tile or the new Galaxy SmartTag employes Bluetooth LE and UWB (Ultra-Wide Band) to locate anything, even people who can’t hook up with the web, but that only works when you’re within range of them. The new solution involves employing the assistance of strangers who have enrolled during a similar program that would assist you to pinpoint an item’s location if said strangers’ phones are near the trackers.
Of course, not everyone could be comfortable posing for the assistance of strangers, especially since it happens automatically instead of personally. The new SmartThings Find Members service, in contrast, puts a more personal touch to its same idea. It allows you to ask up to 19 folks you know and may locate up to 200 devices between those 20 people.
With SmartThings Find Members, you’ll have finer control over who can view which devices and their locations. So it’s a convenient solution for familiar or groups of friends who got to keep track of shared possessions without potentially violating their privacy. Samsung hasn’t detailed yet when this new feature will be available and during which markets, but the covered devices should be equivalent because the normal SmartThings Find.