The company that brought you the levitating Death Star speaker has launched a selection of Star Wars themed key fobs that mean you'll never lose anything important to you ever again! OK, that's an exageration on our part but Rebelscum is pretty sure these will reduce your levels of frustration so you don't have to turn to the Dark Side every time you can't find the keys to your landspeeder.

There are six different fobs to chose: four from the Original Trilogy, which PLOX has labelled as their Classic Range, and two from Episode 8. Those in the Classic Range come as shields while the more modern characters are cut out into their respective shapes.


The selection of characters will certainly appeal to both the collector and the more casual Star Wars fan, but also provide a practical function because each character has a unique Bluetooth identifier frequency which lets you tag an individual item and give it a unique identifier. This lets you have six different items you can track so your family's keys, school bags, wallets and phones will always be less than a few taps away.


When I'm not writing for Rebelscum my time is taken up mowing the local All-Stars baseball club diamonds and I'm quite good at losing the field keys. As an experiment I tagged my field keys with Chewbacca. installed the Android app (which is also available via iTunes) and followed the on-screen instructions.

These were easy enough to follow but I had two gripes: I had to create an account and hand over my email address, and the animated Star Wars Bluetooth Item Finder graphic blocked the text so that I had to go through the one minute process twice because I couldn't see the essential step that told me to press the button on the back of the fob. The set up process also prompts you to take a photo of the item so you can identify it if you have several of the same character fobs.

As chance would have it I had to mow the grass that day, and while doing so I actually managed to drop the keys in the middle of the field. Pulling out my smartphone I opened the app, selected the item I'd lost and touched on the find button. I could immediately hear a faint beeping noise but couldn't quite pick out which direction it was coming from so I selected the map option and was able to get a rough (within a handful of metres) idea of where I needed to start my hunt. As I got closer the shrill alarm drew me directly towards the pitchers mound and within a few minutes I had recovered my keys.



PLOX informs us that the low ampere alarm will ring until the battery is dead or the app is told the item has been located. I ran the alarm for 10 minutes to test this, and only turned it off when it got on my nerves. According to the review on TheForce.net PLOX is considering embedding character sounds in the finders - just imagine the reaction when you activate Darth Vader.

On the subject of the alarm the more nefarious of you might want use these to track people instead of objects but the very audible nature of the tone will let your prey know they are being hunted. Plox confirms that, short of hacking opening the rubber fob and going at the electronics (both of which will void the warranty), there's no way to turn any of their Star Wars Bluetooth Item Finders into a homing beacon. So if you were trying to find a secret Rebel base the easy way you can think again.

Before you start relying on these too heavily you need to make sure that your phone's permissions have been set to give the Plox Finder app access to your device's Bluetooth because once the setup process has been completed there's a chance your phone could deactivate the connection to the Finder. You also can't share the finder over two different accounts - but you can share an account over two devices - so if you've got a Star Wars Bluetooth Item Finder attached to your phone you either have to have it assigned to someone else's account or you'll need to log in to your account on a different phone to find it.

Made of a durable rubber to protect the transceiver chip embedded within it, the finder gives a tactile experience to anyone who wants to fiddle with a wookiee. A particularly nice touch is the colour-matched tether which provides secure attachment to the item you've connected the finder to. I stretched the tether to twice its length and it showed no signs of fatigue.

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These are individually priced at $24.99 and are currently available at getplox.com. As a special offer Rebelscum readers can get 20% off when they enter REBELSCUM20 in the coupon field during checkout.