KeySmart (Aluminum or Pro)
- Made with fancy aircraft aluminum, as opposed, we guess, to common root-beer-can aluminum
- Use one slot for the included loop ring, it can accommodate your ugly, chunky car key and its bulbous fob
- Pro model: Use your phone to find your keys, or your keys to find your phone. If you lose both, you’re S.O.L.
- The Tile tracker on the Pro model is rechargeable via USB, though a charge lasts around 3 months so you can mostly just not worry about it
- Oh, and the Pro comes with a bottle opener, which gives you plenty of justifiable opportunities to show it off at parties
- Model: KS441r, KS019e (succinct, intelligible, and the single terminal lower-case characters give each number a smart, modern panache)
Are you the Gatekeeper
Most “organization” problems are actually accumulation problems. Like, if you want to clean up the mess in your basement, don’t buy and install an elaborate system of bins and racks and shelves for all your junk. Get rid of the junk.
Same with keys. Most people don’t need their enormous wads of keys “organized”; they need them culled. How many keys do you honestly need every day? Probably three: House key, car key, and then one miscellanous key for your mailbox, or bike chain, or the padlock you use at the gym.
That’s not to say you don’t have more keys than that. You totes do. Maybe you’ve got one for a storage unit you rent. Maybe you’ve got one for your parents’ house. You might have one for the fire safe in your bedroom closet, one for your spouse’s vehicle, one for the flimsy locking diary you kept throughout middle school, one for the shed at the lake house, one for the cargo carrier on your roof rack, a few you forgot to give back at your old job, etc., etc.
But you definitely don’t need to lug all those everywhere you go. With rare exception (building maintenance staff, medieval jailors), no one should keep a dozen keys on his or her person.
So we think “organizer” is the wrong way to think of the Keysmart key management system. You don’t really need your keys organized.
You do need them to stop poking you in the leg. You need them not to ruin the line of your jacket or pants with their unsightly gob-of-pointy-metal shape. You need them to stop jingling obnoxiously as you walk. And you need them to stop tangling themselves up in their various rings. (Which, given how difficult these tangles are to undo, it really seems like they shouldn’t naturally occur in the chaos of the pocket. Somehow the jostling action of normal walking regularly transforms our keyring into an olde-timey tavern puzzle? What is up with that?)
The KeySmart can remedy all those frustrations. And, if you choose the model with integrated Tile tracker, it can even help you find your keys when they’re lost — a bad-ass feature you’ll be disappointed you never get to use, since, in our experience, once you stick a Tile on something, you don’t ever misplace it again. It’s like carrying an umbrella to ward off rain. The fates take no pleasure in hassling the prepared.
Respectively, “Aluminum” and “Pro” model KeySmarts can hold up to eight and 10 keys in ideal laboratory conditions. In real life, due to variations in key size/shape/thickness, you may not be able to get that many in yours. But honestly, that’s too many keys to be always carrying around. Move some of those keys off your EDC Keysmart to a secondary ring you only carry on the specific occasions it’s required. (Prediction: You will find you never require it.)
