So I’ve owned the Whistle for almost 8 months now and having recently stopped using it for the Fi collar.
Initially the Whistle worked fine, but the battery life seemed to be quite shorter than what they claim.We were only getting about 2 days between charges which was annoying (the 1 week is really only if our dog is at home on wifi). Location accuracy was just OK, if our home wifi went down we’d get an alert that the dog got out, so I’m assuming it just uses a wifi connection to see if the dog is really inside.
I saw a month or so ago on instagram a new smart collar called Fi and decided to check it out. After doing a bit of research about how they are the first LTE collar where all the rest are apparently only 3g, I decided to give it a try to test their claims of 3 month battery life.
Compared to the whistle, the Fi collar is slightly wider but much lower profile (it's a collar and a tracker in one, where the whistle you put on your own collar with a rubber band). Overall I prefer the shape of the Fi collar, it looks more designed and modern and less bulky. The Fi also has a light that you can turn on at night. I usually turn it on when we go to the dog park because it looks really cool and everyone asks about it haha.
Fi seems much smarter on escape detection, I had my wife take the collar with her to the grocery store to see if it detected an escape, but it properly marked the dog right away as with my wife on a walk! I could also see their actual path, which I could not with the Whistle. Our whistle would usually alert 5 minutes or so after the dog left the house which was less helpful and give us a new location every 3 minutes or so.
We’ve also seen pretty impressive battery life with Fi, we’ve only had it for about a month but the battery is still at 65% from the original charge, so I think we’ll hit 3 months battery which is crazy.
What caused us to give up the whistle for the Fi collar was when we went to Europe for vacation over Christmas our whistle died after 3 days and we couldn’t keep an eye on things at the boarding facility. We feel much safer leaving him home during our next trip this summer and a little less guilty.
The Fi collar is a bit more expensive but I used a coupon on their website and it dropped to basically be the same. For us, the battery life and more accurate escape detection were more than worth the price difference.
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