Fi Mini for Cats review: Track your pets and monitor their activity

Within the app, you can add safe zones, more pets with Fi trackers, and other users who can also track and monitor pets. There’s a Health tab where you can add and store things like vet records, receipts, and insurance information, and add vets to easily share your pet’s documents and get appointment reminders. You can also set up the Fi app on your device Apple watch For faster access to monitoring your pet’s location, activity and safety (including lost status) without the need for a phone.

When you open the app, you’ll see a map with live tracking showing where your pet is currently located, as well as a notification of when they were last outside and where they were. With the latter, you can pull up stats like a site’s timeline, showing them where they were and when. If you drill down on what day the tracker left the house, it will recreate the route, retrace the path and calculate the distance the pet has traveled.

There’s also health monitoring data from activity and sleep tracking, which is very useful for an indoor-only pet like mine. Like other health tracking collars, the sleep and activity stats aren’t 100 percent accurate, as the app uses GPS to track movement, classifying “activity” when the animal is moving and “sleep” when the pet stays still for an extended period of time. This means that if Basil is awake but still, the app may inaccurately classify that as sleep.

Fi Mini App Source: Molly Higgins

In the Rest tab, you can see sleep metrics, including a daily summary of deep sleep, naps, and interruptions during nighttime sleep. You can compare this over time, and the app will notice how much more or less sleep Basil got than the night before. It also compares statistics historically, by week, month and year, so you can track trends and better understand your pet’s normal sleep schedule.

The Activity tab is similar, tracking activity by day, week, and month, with the day’s timeline noting when your pet was most active and for how long. This also compares activity to the previous day. I loved looking at the weekly report, comparing the days during the week to see which ones were the most active, and if any patterns in activity emerged.

For example, I noticed that his sleep versus activity schedule was similar to mine, except that he was active between 4:45 and 6:30 a.m. (while I was still asleep), because that’s when his auto feeder turns off for breakfast and my roommate gets ready to leave for work. He is most active in the evening, when I feed him dinner, have playtime, and my housemates are home, so there is more activity to keep him awake. Historical comparison is also a very useful way to track whether your pet is sleeping more or becoming more lethargic – an early warning sign of a larger health problem.

It is not without its quirks

Since my cat only lives indoors, I’ve been experimenting with tracking location using GPS on both the Fi Mini tracker and my phone. I also asked a friend to take out the tracker without my phone nearby to see if I would be notified that Basil had left the safe zone.

Although it’s better than no alert at all, the Fi’s GPS has limitations (as does the Tractive tracker I tested). It needs a strong signal to communicate with cell towers to determine the exact location. If your phone is close to the smart collar (via Bluetooth), it uses that instead of GPS, making it more accurate and alerting faster. If the pet gets loose and is out of range of your phone, it uses the collar’s cellular antenna (in this case, Verizon’s cell towers). But because the Fi antenna isn’t as powerful as a phone antenna, location accuracy is lower, and communication can be very spotty, especially if your pet is in the country or in an area where there are remote cell towers.