Tested: Digitrak | An expensive luggage scale

The Digitrak smart suitcase has something to make any traveler salivate: it includes a luggage scale, an extra battery to charge your devices and, above all, a GPS. Big problem when we paid $650: the GPS does not work.

WE love

The Digitrak, from the manufacturer Swissdigital Design, is first and foremost a beautiful gray and red suitcase, made of rigid plastic and mounted on four wheels, with a telescopic arm to carry it around. It is 17.3″ deep, 61″ high and 26″ wide. It gives an impression of solidity and good manufacture.

On the top, we have a red leather strap and two small buttons. It’s the luggage scale. By lifting the suitcase with its strap, we obtain the total weight, suitcase and contents, in pounds or kilos. We compared its reading, after filling it with books, with that of our other scale. The two devices diverged by 0.8 lbs, which is honest. The manual promises an accuracy of 500g.

To lock the case, there are two padlocks with configurable numbers. You have to open them and, inside, change the position of a small lever, and put the three digits of your choice.

By pulling the arm of the suitcase upwards, you have access to the more technological part. This is where a removable battery is embedded, which has two sockets, USB-A and microUSB. It is with these sockets that you can charge the battery or connect a device – telephone, earphones or tablet – to recharge it. This removable battery has a capacity of 5200 mAH, roughly the full charge of a phone. It is also what powers another hidden rechargeable battery of 800 mAH, the one which is intended for the cellular connection and which has an autonomy of three or four days.

So far, everything is functional. We must then pair the suitcase to our phone by going to download the application R Guardian, for which a QR code is provided. By pressing a small button next to the battery for two seconds, the suitcase is detected by our phone.

The app R Guardian consists of five buttons at the very bottom of the screen. You can configure alerts when the suitcase is no longer connected via Bluetooth or see the battery level. The most important button is location. This is where we see our suitcase appear in two conditions. When the battery is removed, which must be done before boarding the plane according to the manual, the Bluetooth is disconnected and the cellular signal is on board. The suitcase appears on our map with a “disappearing time” when the stack was removed. It is here that she should then appear again by sending her geolocation by cellular signal.

Upon purchase, you inherit three months of free cellular connection. You then have to pay about $1 per month, depending on packages between 3 and 24 months, by Alipay or PayPal.

We love less

Let’s start with the first hitch: the QR code to download the application R Guardian sends us to a site in Chinese. Fortunately, we found it in the App Store with a simple search.

The instructions in the user manual are very unclear and the application is sloppy.

But it is above all the failure of geolocation that is unforgivable. A whole morning, we tested its capabilities all over Montreal, sometimes with its battery, sometimes without it, leaving the suitcase away from us, then picking it up again. Let’s summarize: the only thing that works properly is the geolocation when you remove the battery. We can then clearly see on the card where this disconnection took place, information obtained from the telephone to which it was connected.

Without its removable main battery, the suitcase never indicated its geolocation, even after a delay of one hour. And our free cellular plan for three months was active, we made sure of it on the application R Guardian.

Defective unit? Battery not charging? Cellular plan activated, but not functional? Impossible to know, and our app gave us no clues. We obviously didn’t try it on a trip abroad. Maybe we would have been more successful.

One buys ?

It would be interesting, for half or a third of the price, to have a suitcase that can weigh itself and whose padlock codes can be changed.

But a $650 suitcase whose main attraction, geolocation and cellphone communication, doesn’t work? No. Too bad, the idea is good.