Chipolo Card Spot Review: AirTag for Your Wallet

Back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, Chipolo unveiled its Card Spot wallet finder, powered by Apple’s Find My network.

In a nutshell, the Chipolo Card Spot will be seen in the Find My app and leverage millions of iPhones to find your lost wallet, similar to an AirTag. Chipolo sent us the Card Spot to check out, so here’s a quick review of how it looks and works.

Inside the box, you get some simple instructions, plus a card with a QR code that sends you to Chipolo’s website to register your Card Spot.

All it requires is a name and email (thanks for making it so easy), and once completed, you’ll get a reminder in two years for 50% off your next Card Spot, as part of the company’s recycle and renew program. You can send your Card Spot back to Chipolo for recycling free of charge, says the company.

The Card Spot itself is the size of a standard credit card, but it’s thicker at 2.4mm:

Here’s the Card Spot next to a Costco membership card:

There’s nothing much to look at on the back of the Card Spot:

From the side, with two credit cards stacked beside it, the Card Spot is just slightly thicker:

A speaker on the Card Spot can be seen in the corner. Chipolo says this speaker can play up to 105dB and in our tests, it’s fairly loud. The Noise app complication on our Apple Watch measured the sound up to 104dB, so it’s within spec we’d say:

Here’s how the Card Spot looks inside our ‘Costanza wallet’. It does add some thickness but if you don’t have a lot of cards in your wallet, you won’t be affected by the Card Spot. It’s way thinner than jamming an AirTag into your wallet:

As for the setup of the Chipolo Card Spot, it’s really easy. You press the button on the Card Spot, launch Find My, tap the ‘Items’ tab, then the “+” icon and choose “Add Other Item”.

The app will search and Chipolo Card Spot will appear. You then name the item to continue. In our case, an unknown error occurred a couple of times before it was added to our Find My app.

You also get to pick an emoji for your Card Spot, plus it will be registered to your Apple ID. You’ll be able to get directions to your Card Spot, play a sound and also enable Lost Mode, to alert others who find your wallet with a message. You can also set up enable notifications when you leave your Card Spot behind, which is handy if you’re always forgetting your wallet.

One feature missing that AirTags have is precision finding that leverages Ultra Wideband in an iPhone 11 or newer, to get exact locations down to the metre.

The Chipolo Card Spot is a great addition to your wallet, at the cost of $35 USD for 1 or $60 USD for 2. It’s not exactly cheap, but if the Card Spot helps you recover your lost wallet, that can be worth its weight in gold. Right now they’re sold out but pre-orders will ship in April 2022.