Whistle 3 GPS Pet Tracker

The Whistle 3 GPS Pet Tracker is a new piece of smart tech that makes the promise it will keep digital tabs on your pet at all times while also monitoring his daily activity. If knowing where your pet is at all times is important to you, Whistle is possibly the best device of its type around.

If you are a dog or cat owner, the thought of your best friend becoming lost is one of the most terrifying fears imaginable. The second that you know your pet is missing, your heart sinks and your mind reels. You want to know where your buddy is and you want to know now. The Whistle 3 is a product that monitors your pet’s location so that you will never have to freak out about where Fido or Mittens is again. The product also monitors how much exercise and activity your pet is getting throughout the day. Whether you’re trying to make sure that your pet is safe and sound, or if you’re just looking for a dog version of a Fitbit, the Whistle 3 a good option to try.

This product is for anyone that owns a pet and is worried about them becoming lost, or just for those who want to track their pet’s activities. If you own a pet, you have almost certainly worried about it running away. Or maybe you have a dog that actually does run away.  There have long been technologies out there that can help get your pet back to you if he is lost, but now that technology is available through your smartphone. Whistle has been putting out products to track your pet’s health and fitness activities since 2013, and recently added GPS tracking so you can track your pet’s whereabouts through your smartphone. The Whistle 3 GPS Pet Tracker is the latest and the best that Whistle has to offer.

This product is also for those of us who are tech-savvy, and who love gadgets. The Whistle application is compatible with iOS 9.0 or later, or Android 5.0 or later. Basically, any phone less than four years old should be fine to connect to it. While the activity monitor is cool, the main hook is that pet owners get a notification as soon as their pet leaves the designated safe zone. When you get a notification, you simply tap on it and you are taken to a GPS screen, which will not only show you where your dog is, it will also tell you when they left the safe zone, to give you a hint as to where they are headed next.

The Whistle 3 is pretty simple to use right out of the box, and it is very intuitive as to how to put it together and attach it to your pet’s collar. In theory, you can use it right away, but as they include a charger, giving it a full charge first is advisable. The Whistle 3 GPS Pet Tracker uses an infrastructure that includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular and GPS radio for fast and accurate pet location. The new Whistle 3 app is much simpler to use than previous iterations, too. If you release a small clip on the side of the unit, you will see a five-pin connector that you can plug into your computer to gather data at any time, if you wish.

The physical design is cool in its simplicity. It looks like a small grey box and is subtle enough to go unnoticed, both by you and your dog. It attaches to the collar and weighs less than an ounce, so your hound will get used to it quickly if he notices it at all. Once you purchase a subscription for the Whistle 3, you will have nationwide cellular coverage on your plan, so as long as you have smartphone service, you can use the app. It can handle being fully submerged in water for quite a long time and is sealed so well that, no matter how much digging, swimming or running your dog does, the internal components should not be affected.

One of the coolest new features of the app is the geofencing aspect that supports more than one safe place. Whether your dog is chilling at home when you are not there, with you at work, hanging out with you on vacation, or even running around in a friend’s backyard, you can establish his safe boundaries and be notified right away the second your pet leaves them. If you were into the whole “Fitbit for dogs” label that Whistle was tagged with, the product now has even better activity monitoring. Previously, the Whistle would update your pet’s activity data only once a day, but currently, the Whistle 3 GPS Pet Tracker can get data to your phone hourly, so you don’t have to wait to find out if your dog has been snoozing on the couch all day, or tearing around your house like a lunatic.

Just as with Fitbit, you can now manually get activity data in real time. Whistle takes that data set and compares it against similar data from its doggie demographics, so you can check out whether your dog is getting enough activity, or needs more. This, of course, is way more about the owner than the dog. Your dog gets bored and less fit if he gets less activity, but he doesn’t need the data to prove it one way or the other. But the owner, on the other hand, not only wants to know that their dog is in a good space, mentally and physically, they also want to know that they are the best darn dog parent around. The Whistle 3 lets you know how you are doing, just as much as it does so for your dog.

Looking for other tracking options? Check out our GPS trackers page for more in-depth reviews.