Fi Mini for Cats Review: Track Your Pets and Monitor Their Activity | WIRED

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Rating:7/10

Open rating explainerInformation

WIRED

Long battery life. USB-C charging. Compact size. Multiple easy collar attachments included.

TIRED

Location works best if near your phone. Alerts lag when outside of safe zones. Mistakenly alerted that my cat escaped three times during testing. App needs to be open on phone to work properly.

As a helicopter pet parent, for many years I attached an Apple AirTag to my cat Basil's collar for extra peace of mind. But with location inaccuracy, no real-time tracking, and dependence on Bluetooth range, this wasn’t an ideal solution. Many pet-tech companies are now developing devices that use cellular coverage to enable real-time location tracking, as well as integrating health-monitoring features into the trackers.

These new smart health collars are sort of like smart rings for people, which let wearers track important metrics like activity, health, and sleep. On the Fi Mini, the connected phone app lets you view daily stats without needing a wearable screen, unlike a smartwatch or fitness tracker.

I tested the Fi Mini smart collar for cats for a month ahead of the launch of my forthcoming guide to smart collars for pets. (I first tested the Tractive Smart Cat Tracker for that guide.) Although my cat stays indoors, I tested the GPS capabilities and the health metrics that an over-invested pet parent like me wants, including sleep and activity tracking to monitor trends over time.

For the Helicopter Pet Parent

Courtesy of Fi

I tested the Mini designed specifically for cats, which is even smaller, lighter, and more compact than the Mini for dogs. When you purchase, you're actually buying your selected membership plan for GPS tracking and alerting, as well as sleep and activity data, while the device itself comes free.

At the time of writing, a monthly plan is $4.40 per week, billed as $19 per month. But if you prepay for a longer period, you'll save, with 6-month plans billed at $99 twice a year, one-year plans billed at $189 annually, or two-year plans billed at $339 biennially. Plus, Fi runs deep discounts nearly year-round, with offers of $35, $50, and $70 off depending on the plan you choose. And if you have multiple pets with Fis, you can get 5 percent off all membership plans. Each Fi tracker has a 30-day trial and a one-year warranty.

The device itself looks like a small, lightweight black plastic brick, about 1.5 x 1.0 x 0.5 inches. It comes with a strap loop and two types of soft cases, so you have options for attaching the device to your pet's collar. I chose the loop because it's a simple, stretchy rubber material, which made charging much easier because I could just slip it out without needing to remove Basil's entire collar.

The device uses USB-C for charging, which I appreciated, since I have no shortage of those cables around my house, and it took a little over two hours to fully charge. The device claims it can last up to six weeks on a single charge, but I found myself charging it about every two to two and a half weeks. You can add an optional Fi Base in your home to help with location accuracy and extend battery life to six to eight weeks. Instead of using your phone as the point of connection, the Fi Mini connects via Bluetooth to the Fi Base to reduce power consumption and extend battery life.

The Fi Mini Cat Collar's battery life and ease of charging are a vast improvement over the Tractive Smart Cat Tracker, which held a charge for less than five days and required a tricky collar insert and special charger, which made taking off and putting on the device so often quite annoying. Now that I've tested a few of these, simple things like ease of device insertion and infrequent charging make a surprising difference in my excitement to keep using the tracker.

To set up, you'll need to download the connected app, enter Wi-Fi information, and set up your pet's profile by adding birth date, sex, weight, breed, and a photo. Then you'll choose which device you're connecting to the profile, hook it up to the charger, and it will look for the new device using Bluetooth. When I tested, the setup process was immediate.

Fi Mini App source Molly Higgins

Once you can start tracking, you'll need to map out a safe zone, including “home” and any other spaces where your pet can roam without triggering in-app alerts. This feature would be helpful for someone like my colleague Scott Gilbertson (he's testing a dog-specific tracker on my behalf), who lives on a large swath of land where his dog is free to roam, but he wants to be able to track where his pet goes—and be alerted if they go too far.

But as a person with an indoor-only cat living in a busy part of Brookly