I only had a few minutes to play with it. Hoping to get it actually mounted tonight and have it up and running. Nevertheless, here are my first impressions:
Camera Quality
Pleasantly surprised! Camera quality is clearly superior to any other baby monitor I’ve ever used. Sharp, super clear image. Very minor delay (half a second maybe). 15fps. Haven’t been able to test night vision yet, but with how good the image looked in low light in the room I tested it in, I imagine night vision will be sharp and clear as well.
Features and Sensors
Temperature Sensor
Works well. When enabled, it overlays the room temp on the video, and you can set it to provide alerts if the temperature goes out of a specific range (too cold or too hot).
Sound Alerts
The audio quality is clear and plenty loud through my phone’s speakers. You can see where they replaced the feature descriptions with a sticker claiming to alert you when your baby cries to alerting you of loud noises. Either it wasn’t good at discerning between cries and other noises, or they didn’t want the liability of it failing to detect a cry when there’s background noise present.
Surprise Bonus, Game-Changing Feature
Nowhere in the product description or provided quick start guide mentions this. But in the app, you can set it up specifically with your baby and create their profile. You set their birthdate and/or due date, weight, and skin tone. Why skin tone? It notes that “Infrared sensors detect your baby’s heart rate and blood oxygen levels. This setting may need to be adjusted for different skin tones.” To my knowledge, these kind of features are only found on $300+ models. Unable to test it yet without a baby to test it with, but I’m really excited for that feature, as SIDS is a terrifying possibility as a parent. Any warning that could help monitor and stop a tragedy from happening is HUGE. Here’s hoping it actually works well.
Setup
Setup was overall intuitive and easy. The only thing that wasn’t clear from the get go is that it could only be paired with one account. Quickly, however, I found a sharing option that allows you to share full-featured access to the camera with other users. I’ve not played with it enough to know if it allows a more limited share as well (limited hours, no ability to move the camera for example). I don’t know if I’d want to give out full access even to grandparents for the sake of my wife nursing, etc. But if we could limit the time frames and limit viewing angles for sharing, then that would potentially be great bonus feature.
Firmware Update
I checked for a firmware update and was prompted to update the firmware from (if I remember correctly) 1.1.1.5 to 1.1.4.3. There was no documentation or explanation as to what that update provided, but it updated quickly and flawlessly. I didn’t notice anything new in the app before/after.
As I get more time to work with it, I’ll update with my thoughts and reactions.