Once you've done that, you can set up automatic, free alerts for those locations. When your trackee enters or leaves one of these zones, you get a text message, an e-mail message or both saying, for example, "Chris has arrived at IrresponsibleFriendsHouse."
You can also ping the Zoombak at any time from your cellphone, once you've registered that phone on the Web site. You may feel as if you're doing your taxes all over again — you have to type out your password, a comma, a space and then its name ("1823, Spybot7" or whatever). But in seconds, you get a text message that says something like, "Your Zoombak locator Spybot7 is currently located near 500 West 57th St, New York, NY." It's creepy good.
When all of this works, it's awesome. As long as your wily subject doesn't toss the Zoombak into the back of a passing truck, à la "The DaVinci Code," you're getting pure peace of mind for $15 a month.
So why wouldn't it work? Why are the customer reviews on Amazon all over the map?
First, Zoombak's price, features and reliability have come a long way since its debut a year and a half ago. It used to cost $200, not $100, and there were plenty of technical glitches and missing features at the outset. (There's also a pet version, also $100, which includes a Velcro pouch to attach it to the pooch's collar, and a car-kit version, $150, that includes a cigarette lighter cord as well as a hard-wired trunk-installation kit.)
Second, that safety-zone alert system depends on the Zoombak's 15-minute ping schedule. If your dog runs into a zone and then runs out again within 15 minutes, you won't even know it happened. This also means that whoever kidnaps your child or hot-wires your car has at least a 15-minute head start.
Finally, and most important, once Zoombak determines its location using GPS, it transmits that information to you using the cellular network. Unfortunately, it's T-Mobile's.
As you probably know, T-Mobile's American coverage is not, ahem, blanketlike; huge swaths of this country out West, and far too many smaller swaths everywhere else, have no signal at all. In those areas, the Zoombak falls into radio silence — useless. If I were a car thief or dognapper, I'd set up shop in Montana.
That's the biggest downside, but it's not the only one. For example, although the Zoombak has a 30-day guarantee, you can never change its account information. When old Rover finally arrives at the big kennel in the sky, your Zoombak can't protect another family's deserving critter.
The Web site needs a lot of design help, too — should you click Save or Finish? Locator or Tracking? — and it's incompatible with the Safari Web browser. There have been plenty of complaints online about Zoombak's Costa Rica-based tech support department, too, although Zoombak swears that that's improved recently, and at least it's available 24 hours a day, toll-free. For some people, there's a certain flakiness to those e-mail and text-message alerts, too.
So who knew? There really is such a thing as compact tracking devices, just like the ones in the spy movies. This one is nicely priced, well built and, fortunately, undergoing constant refinement.
Even so, Hollywood still has a ways to go before it attains accuracy in its depiction of real-world technology. Just once, I'd like to see the hero of "Mission: Impossible" lose the villain's trail, swat his forehead and mutter, "Dang that T-Mobile network!"
