Hi — I’m Tabiiku. I travel around Japan with my daughter on the principle that experience is the best thing you can give a child. This post is not about travel: it is about the GPS trackers we use for my daughter, and why we ended up with two of them.
Our arrangement is a double school run — an international school plus an after-school programme — with a sitter moving her between the two. Which left me anxious in the gaps: did she meet the sitter? Did she get to after-school? Is the school bus running late?
So I decided to give her a GPS tracker — and then discovered there are a great many of them and no obvious way to choose. Here are the two I have actually used and would recommend.
1. Mitene Mimamori GPS
You may already know Mitene as a shared photo album app. The same company makes a GPS tracker, and it was my first. What is good about it is simple:
- Battery life. Three to five days between charges.
- Price. 5,280 yen up front (5,808 yen with tax) plus 480 yen a month (528 yen with tax).
- The interface. This is a company that started as a web service, and it shows — the app design is genuinely good. It lays out clearly where she was and when.
- The company’s support. One unit stopped working, and they contacted me before I contacted them, sent a replacement immediately, and told me not to bother returning the faulty one.
It is well balanced on every axis. If all you want is to know where your child is, buy this one and stop researching.
2. BoT Talk
I had no complaints about the Mitene tracker at all. But my daughter said, rather sweetly, that there were times she really wanted to hear my voice — so I looked for something that would let us talk during the journey or in her free time at after-school.
The audio is very clear and it feels close to a voice chat. When a message from a parent arrives, the child’s device flashes to let them know. Her first message to me was “Mum, I love you most in the whole world”. Worth every yen.
Other companies make devices that allow talking and I did look at them, but the talk time limits were extremely short or the monthly cost was higher, so I settled on BoT Talk. Several people I know use it, and they all seem equally floored by the messages they get.
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