[ocdtrekkie]

A lot of people talk to themselves. Most small-time thieves are not known for incredible intelligence. If you look close enough to realize it has cameras, you might realize you are on video and should get rid of it quickly. Consumer products are far more reliable than rolling your own solution nine times out of ten. Had he failed to recover the device, the video still would've been pretty cool.

If it's traceable, throwing it in your own trash isn't much worse than throwing it elsewhere, since it already has the coordinates of your house anyways. GPS works fine on small packages and a lot of businesses/products exist specifically to take advantage of this. Also note that as full-featured smartphones, he's likely got the full power of Google Location Services in play, which can identify what floor of a building (or parking garage) you're on, and of course, even if it failed to get signal in the parking garage would surely show location up to the parking garage. Inside a parking garage, a bright white box is not hard to find. Also, he has four GPS devices facing different directions, so he's got a lot of backup for failure here.