Gadgetory

hey I'm seen that's right Chris and this is the spotter from the team of quirky and GE this is a multi-purpose sensor that can track light sound motion temperature and humidity changes and then use that to trigger your devices or send you notifications now the spotter is magnetic so you can stick it to your fridge or you can mount it to the wall using mounting screws or sticky tabs or just sitting on a desk you can power it one of two ways you can plug it in using the included AC cable or you can use the battery backup just to double-a batteries and that'll keep it going on battery mode though it'll only do motion and light detection can't do the other stuff now this is a very new product and it shows a lot of promise and potential it'd be great to have a sensor capable of doing all the things that can do that works reliably however the spotter doesn't quite work as consistently as I'd like at this point now in my tests I found that it worked well when it had the power plugged in and the batteries out reason for this is that you reboot the spotter by taking all the power out of it no battery is no power cord and then plugging that cord back in it'll log on to the network download any new firmware that's up there and get up to speed and at that point it seems to work really well but if you change the battery status by adding batteries and then unplugging it or if you move the spot or somewhere that can kind of confuse it and then it stops working so reliably the a be used to control is the wing cap from quirky and this is the same map we saw with the pivot power genius and with the egg minder we looked at it's a great app it looks really nice it gives you a lot of helpful information but it's lacking some key features it doesn't give you a timeline of events won't tell you all the things that happen during the day to the spotter like when the lights came on or when the temperature changed you can't go back and view that history and that's kind of a big omission in my book also you can't check the status of the spotter in real time it's got the temperature sensor in there but you can't log into the app and check what the temperature is at the current moment that seems like a big oversight in my opinion we also saw some little things that sort of threw us for a loop like if you try and turn a trigger off that you've set up and then exit that menu when you come back that trigger will be on again it's kind of strange and I think it just needs another pass from the development team now if you're an early adopter and you want to try out this new technology quirky has a bunch of devices coming out that are all supposed to work with this so it could be very cool and like I said it's got a lot of promise and a lot of these problems might be fixed with a couple of good firmware updates but right now it's not working as reliably as I'd like if I was gonna automate my appliances I'd probably go with the Belkin Wemo switch in motion which and our tests did quite well so holidays are coming up if I had to choose one to have in my stocking and be belkin's but next year don't be surprised if the spotter ends up on my wish list you're seeing that I'm right