Amcrest GPS Tracker Review

I review the Amcrest GPS Tracker

Amazon.ca Title: Amcrest Professional Grade Portable GPS Tracker - For High-Accuracy Realtime Monitoring + Recording with SOS Broadcast, Auto-Motion Detection, Email/SMS Alerts, Geofencing, Water-Resistance, and More

Amazon.ca Link: Link: Review Text ----

Title: A great GPS Tracker for assets in cell phone range, that you can track from anywhere you can get on the web

This GPS Tracker is a simple, sealed up unit with a single button to turn it on and off and a miniUSB port for recharging it (behind a waterproof seal). Everything else is internal and done through the website (even the SIM card is screwed in, although you could get in there if you tried). There are three lights on the front to indicate status. Pretty much that's it.

The real magic comes when you hook it up via Amcrest's website and start tracking. Soon you realize this unit has motion detection (good for battery saving when you are not moving) and will work anywhere it can get a phone signal. Battery life is spectacular (25% in 5 days for 2 commutes a day + some driving around during the day) and it appears to have no trouble detecting GPS satellites once it gets a good view of the sky. For the test, my girlfriend put the tracker in her cup holder rather than on the dashboard, and it appeared to be just fine. The website companion to this tracker, at the time of writing at least, had several map layers, the ability to create zones, alerts and reports and stored data for later review. You can choose the frequency you receive updates, my demo account did once every 30 seconds and this seemed fine, but you could get more than that (at a higher subscription cost). It's worth noting that service starts at $25 a month (at the time of review).

There were some rough edged on the website. Speed was in miles per hour but all other units were in metric, you could not reset the tracker's odometer and alerts were hard to dismiss once you'd reviewed them. During the test though, I also saw updates applied to the website, so it may be Amcrest fixes this.

Overall, it's a good device, simple to use. I can see fleet monitoring, pet tracking or asset tracking being good uses for it.

Pros:

* Simple to use (charge it, turn it on, put it on whatever you want to track)

* Waterproofing on external ports

* Long battery life (25% per 5 days of simple commute tracking)

* Decent tracking website that worked in popular browsers and had multiple map selections and reports

Cons:

* There were some parts of the website that didn't work too well, see the paragraph above. However, Amcrest could have very well fixed this by the time you read it.

I was given a sample in exchange for an honest opinion