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Oppo’s leaked tracking tag has UWB and USB-C charging

Oppo’s leaked tracking tag has UWB and USB-C charging

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One-upping AirTags

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Photos: XDA / Digital Chat Station (Weibo)

It looks like Oppo will be the next company to throw its hat in the Bluetooth tracking tag game, with a leak of the company’s new Smart Tag appearing over on XDA (via Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station).

Oppo’s tracker looks to distinguish itself in at least one key way from other major tracking tags by offering a USB-C port for recharging the tags, instead of requiring replaceable coin cell batteries (or even worse, nonremovable batteries, as is the case on some Tile trackers). That should make the new Oppo tags a bit more environmentally friendly, although it’s unclear what the impact on battery life will be compared to a more traditional battery system.

And while details are slim on the Oppo Smart Tag, the leak does confirm that the tracker will support ultra-wideband radio for more precise tracking, similar to Apple’s recently revealed AirTag tracker and Samsung’s SmartTag Plus (which was released earlier in April).

Of course, a Bluetooth tracker is only as good as the network of devices that can support it. Tile, the longtime leader in the tracking tag space, has spent almost a decade building up its network of tags, and Apple’s Find My network is able to leverage the hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads in the world to track down AirTags.

With 9 percent of the global market share at the end of 2020 (according to Counterpoint Research’s data), Oppo can likely make a good case that it has the market saturation to make its tags effective, too, but it’ll likely heavily depend on where users are in the world and how popular Oppo’s phones are in that area.