Pros & Cons
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- Excellent packaging in collapsible dog bowl.
- Option to buy SIM for your own 3G tracking.
- Works with cats.
- Bright night light.
- Includes activity tracking.
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- Poor battery life.
- Inaccurate warning alerts in testing.
- May need to unscrew hardware to install a SIM card.
- Can't charge without taking it off of collar.
The $79.99 Paby packs a lot into a light, bowtie-shaped pet tracker. It monitors activity and location for both dogs and cats, has a bright tracking light, and lets you bring your own cellular service plan for GPS. That said, it lacks Bluetooth connectivity and isn't great for tracking location directly in or around the house. It also suffers from poor battery life and sent a number of inaccurate warning alerts in testing. For the same price, the Whistle 3 earns our Editors' Choice for offering a much better experience overall.
Pricing
If you buy a SIM card directly from Paby, the service is $59.88 for one year. That works out to $4.99 per month, which is typical among cellular-enabled trackers. The cheapest cost over two years of use is $194.76 (the first 30 days is a free trial). That's virtually identical to the similarly equipped Tractive GPS 3G at $194.98, and a bit less expensive than the Whistle 3 at $246.75. The cheapest is the Nuzzle, which has a one-time lifetime-use fee of $189.99.
If you decide to use your own nano SIM card, it has to support WCDMA and GSM—in the US that means using AT&T or T-Mobile. Will bringing your own SIM save you money? I called the local AT&T outlet and was told a nano SIM with a data-only plan is $25 per month for 2GB of data. That's definitely not saving you anything, and it's also overkill: Paby estimates the average customer uses 43MB of data per month. Perhaps this option works out better for people in other countries.
As with any tracker, you should test it thoroughly in the first few days; Paby has a 30-day full money back policy to go with that 30-day trial. The hardware has a one-year warranty.
Design and Features
The Paby ( at Amazon) has the absolute best packaging I've seen for any pet tracker: It comes in a collapsible silicone pet bowl, free of BPA and lead, with a lid! All electronics should be on the shelf in something so sustainable (sadly, the foam inside is less eco-friendly).
In the package comes the Paby itself, an extra elastic band to attach it on a collar, a screwdriver (which you need, not only to change the SIM, but even to change the elastic band), and a charging cable. It doesn't come with a collar like the Link AKC or Nuzzle.
The Paby itself weighs only 1.15 ounces and measures 2.3 by 1.3 by 0.7 inches (HWD), so it's not very obtrusive on a dog collar. Cats may feel otherwise. You can also attach it to pretty much anything else you want to keep an eye on, so long as you can figure a way to keep it attached. It comes in five designs, including spider red (so your dog can feel like Peter Parker), midnight black, bubble pink, all-star (black with pink stars), and future green (a bubble-like camo).
The tracker is rated IP67 for water resistance, which means it can survive in up to one meter of water for 30 minutes. An LED inside shines through the plastic shell, with typical color coding: red is disconnected or can't find the cell network, green is connected, and blue is searching for a network. There's a power button on the back, and a small alarm speaker.
The Paby feels secure on a collar. The elastic band is similar to that of the FitBark. However, should the band on the Paby break, you need to remove the metal plate on the back to put on the replacement band, which is annoying because of the microscopic screws. It's also worth noting that it uses a proprietary charger, and must be removed completely from the collar to charge.
In testing, the polymer lithium ion battery was good for 2.5 days at best with little to no activity; throw in a couple of hikes and it was about a day and half. Battery life is paltry compared with the Whistle 3 and Tractive GPS 3G, which can handle three times that. It's obvious why the Paby's device settings let you turn off almost every feature to save juice; but the more you turn off, the less effective it is at monitoring your pet.
App and Performance
Setting up the tracker requires the free Paby app for Android or iOS; there is no web-based desktop option. After you create a personal account in the app, scan the QR code on the back of the Paby and assign a pet profile to the device. You can use multiple Paby devices for multiple pets. The profiles are only for dogs and cats. You can pick a dog breed, but not a mix of them, and you can't pick a cat breed at all. I found it annoying not being able to list my testing assistant, Gretta, as a pit bull; I settled for Staffordshire Bull Terrier since pit bull isn't a "formal" breed.
The maps in the Paby app are from Google. You can only log into your account on one device at a time, so you can't share it with another pet guardian. However, as with Tractive, you can share the info on your pet. Others can download the app, create an account, then scan a QR code in your app's settings menu to share.
The app's device settings cover most of the features, including sharing, firmware updates for new features, scheduled power on/off, low power mode (which sets the virtual Leash detection to every five minutes instead of one minute), and various location-based services (LBS) settings. Those include a few days of location history displayed on a map; the virtual Leash, where the Paby uses your home Wi-Fi signal as safe zone; and the virtual Fence, which defines a safe zone based on your address (or multiple addresses) using 2G cell towers (within 100-meter accuracy) and GPS satellites (for 5 to 30 meters of variance) for tracking.
Much like the Tractive, the Paby's use of GPS for a safe zone makes for an area that's far too large in some cases. I was only able to shrink the circular safe zone down to a radius of 110 yards, at best, which meant my home safe zone bled into neighbors' yards and out to the main road. Because of that, it's nice to have ther Wi-Fi option, which makes for a much tighter and localized safe zone.
The tracker sends all data via cellular connectivity, not Wi-Fi, so if you don't have a working SIM card installed, you won't receive any notifications at all. Accuracy is an issue. There were times when Gretta left the safe zone on a walk with both the Fence and Leash options activated and I didn't get a single notification. I had to go into the app and turn on active tracking. I turned around and walked her again and got notifications after leaving the zone this time—but the Fence notification came in a full seven minutes after the Leash notification. It wasn't unheard of to get a couple of false positives about leaving even as you entered a safe area, or vice versa.
Turning on active/live location tracking means hitting the icon with two paws and choosing from a menu: Do you want lights on? Do you want sound? How long (10, 30, or 60 minutes)? The high-pitched alarm issued from the Paby's tiny, tinny speaker is loud and annoying, more than enough to stop Gretta in her tracks, but other dogs might freak out and bolt. A built-in light flashes red and blue (like a cop car), and at night is the most visible of any I've seen on a tracker.
The live location tracking worked fine in real-time as I watched the screen—and you want that if a pet is lost, or even if you're watching where the pet goes as a dog walker takes them for a jaunt. But looking at the travel data later in the location history, it showed us on a road parallel to the trail we took, a good 500 feet away. That's an error I haven't seen in any other tracker.
The Paby also tracks physical activity. The app recommends an activity level based on your dog's age and size, measures steps and time spent active, and can extrapolate how many calories have been burned. There is a big percentage reading at the top of the screen to tell you just how much of the dog's activity has been accomplished, while a graph at bottom shows which hours, days, or months were the most active. With enough data, you can zoom out to see the most active times of the whole year.
Conclusions
There is a lot to like about the Paby—it's got some design sense, it's nicely sized for just about any dog or cat, and in the right market some users will appreciate the option to bring their own paid data plan. But its battery life is too short, and I experienced too many tracking errors in testing to be able to recommend it over other options. The Whistle 3 is still the way to go, even if it costs a little more over the course of a couple of years; the peace of mind it buys you will be worth it.