Description
I love the idea of a security camera you can access from your phone. You charge this up, and set it up where you want. The mount fixes with two screws; and the box contains screw guides to help with this, particularly useful for outside mountings. THe camera itself attaches using a powerful magnet. It is powerful, and secure, but obviously can be moved by anyone; I found my teenager moved it as he didn’t want to be seen when he walked up or down the stairs. Clearly you can make this harder by putting in a less accessible place.
Once this is done, you need to connect. This is a bit of a faff, but was fairly straightforward. You have to connect via your own wifi (with password) before going in to the Swann version. If you want to record any video, then you need to pay a monthly or annual fee. But you can see live video, and your phone gets a notification when there is movement. Given I have cats, that was fairly frequent.
The downside is the time it takes to connect to the live feed. Where I am just watching the feed (and you get around 30 - 40 seconds), you can tap to reconnect and that was fairly stable. But where I got a notification, and then tapped, I found it could take several minutes, which meant any activity had long since finished. A burglar is often in and out of your house in 2-3 minutes; you could find that by the time you manage to connect, they have left.
THis will connect to more than one device, so you can set up a network; but in my view it all comes down to what you want this for. If you want the occaisional check up on a pet; or to watch an elderly relative and carer, then this may be useful, as you can sit and watch reasonably easily. But if you want to go by movement then it wasn’t as good.
I understand that therer is a firmware update that has sorted this issue and made it quicker; the issue for me is that to access the update, you need to subscribe. And I didn’t want to subscribe.
On a fun level, this is great. I just wouldn’t want to rely on this to pick up a burglar.