Gadgetory

hey I'm seen that's right Chris Tara the first take of canary this is the all-in-one security device that did very well on IndieGoGo back in the summer of 2013 and now in January of 2015 it's finally shipping out to backers including the two units you see here that we got at CNN appliances HQ now canary you can be armed it can be disarmed you can put it in a privacy mode that turns off the camera and the microphone it also has temperature and humidity sensors and air quality sensors that we'll watch for the general conditions around the home it doesn't have any sort of home automation capabilities so it doesn't have a z-wave radio or ZigBee radio it can't communicate with third-party devices like smart locks and smart lights and integrate them into your system the way that a device like Piper can and that's kind of a shortcoming in my opinion I think that smart lighting especially is a really good thing to add to a smart security kit you have someone trying to get in at night or the motion sensor picking something up you want to light to come on that's a really good deterrent you can't do that with canary at least not yet also you have to update your canary with the latest firmware as you set it up with your system and that was a real tough process we had to do that several times over the course of about two days before we finally got it updated and up to speed and able to work once it was I tried it out in my apartment and the general functionality of the system worked but the camera feed was not really viewable you can watch about 30 seconds of black and then maybe two seconds of live video and then back to black it was a bit of a pain was until we brought it back to work and tried it again here at the office that we got that live video feed up and running now one last complaint that I have about canary is setup in its current state is that it doesn't let you set it to automatically trigger the siren so right now it's an armed mode that's this green light at the bottom that means that it should send me an alert whenever the text motion it should give me the option to call the police if I need to but it won't do any of that itself it won't even sound the siren on its own so if someone's breaking in in the middle of the night I'll get a notification on my phone saying there's activity but that siren won't go off canary says that they're gonna change that they're gonna add a feature for auto siren mode but that's not ready right now now canary is currently shipping out to backers and pre-orders from last year and should arrive in retail outlets like Best Buy and Target by this spring and at that point those new features should be baked and the system should be a little better developed that Android app should also be out so at that time before it goes live to retail we're gonna have a full review up but for now we're gonna give it a few more weeks at least to see how it develops thanks for watching be sure to check out the rest of my smart home coverage at cnet.com for CNET appliances i'm right