Gadgetory

the original Dropcam took the home monitoring market by storm and the Dropcam proclaims to be even better maybe it's as amazing as they say maybe it's designed to prey on people with more money than sense maybe the truth lies somewhere in between watch on to find out the jazz mini phone and tablet stand from Coolermaster is now available in a variety of cool colors from these great retailers click now to learn more the unboxing experience for consumer friendly products from smart brands is always good I was actually kind of fun in this case because other than hearing ads on the radio I did no research on the Dropcam Pro before buying one to do this review the camera comes pre-installed in a simple aluminum mount there's a QuickStart guide that I'll be using to test their 60-second set-up plane there are some screws in a wall now that the base clips into and then I was a bit surprised to find out that it's powered by a long thick microUSB cable on a wall wart instead of something thinner easier to find sensible places to plug in and more durable let's go back to the camera though at the front there's an all-glass 130 degree wide angle lens not good for a cinematic look but definitely useful if you want to monitor a large area since there's no support for pen and tilt and behind that lens is a new high sensitivity 3rd inch sensor that's about 2 times the surface area of the older HD model making it better for low-light situations you can't see them now but around the lens are some unexceptional IR LEDs that it uses for night mode and then at the bottom we find the micro USB plug for power or setup if you decide to use a PC finally internally we find a speaker as well as a little microphone port for two-way voice a dual band wireless end setup and Bluetooth Low Energy for setting up with a smartphone or tablet if you choose to go that route now on to set up but first story time now I'd heard of Dropcam but I never really cared about it because I've been burned by subpar consumer grade network cameras so many times thought I was just over them as a category all the ones that you're looking at now I was given for free and still never bothered to use because they were just too useless and horrible and it was always the same issues complicated setup flaky apps rubbish image quality and worst of all feature lists that were so short it was almost like the manufacturer was intentionally nerfing the product to avoid cannibalizing the sales of a higher-end offering in spite of the fact that many of these companies didn't even have higher end offerings anyway the thing that made me say maybe there's something to this was the fact that nest owned by Google acquired them and then I knew I had to review it when I saw their claims of 60-second setup did they really find the holy grail of networking product development was it that easy to deploy the answer is actually yeah it takes a lot longer than a minute and their own website seems to have been updated to reflect that even if amazon's hasn't but for pc setup you plug it in with a USB cable and follow the on-screen prompts and for smart phone setup you pair it via bluetooth install the app and follow the on-screen prompts the guide they guide you through creating a Dropcam account connecting to your Wi-Fi network and placing the Dropcam within Wi-Fi range somewhere that it'll monitor something useful so not the inside of your petal reader then once it's configured the simplicity keeps on coming using a browser on a PC or the app you can monitor the camera live you can zoom you have two-way voice communication with people or pets on the other side I'll be it with a significant delay and you can categorise repetitive events so that Dropcam will either notify you when a certain important thing happens let's say whenever the front door opens or ignore it when uninteresting things happen let's say when the cat jumps up onto the bookshelf this is cool because these events also enable you to much more quickly scrub through save footage in the PVR of sorry CVR feature where it marks them on a timeline so finding out when little suddenly came home last night is super easy too bad this functionality is let down by a couple of small problems so first it's still beta and there are some kinks to work out basic stuffs okay but more complicated classifying things on its own is a little bit rough right now and second cv R stands for cloud video recorder a subscription-based that you need to pay for monthly in order to do anything other than monitor the drop can live yeah after your pathetic 14-day trial of CVR to make the let's face it not that special plastic camera that you already paid $200 for useful for anything other than live-streaming you need to pay $100 a year for your first drop cam and $50 a year for each subsequent one and that's if you only want the last seven days of saved footage 30 days costs triple there is no hardware reason the drop cam can't store footage on a drive or a PC on the same network which would save bandwidth from your monthly data cap and improve the quality of your internet use experience since constantly uploading 720p video will affect your network speed especially if you start adding more than one camera and while I'm aware of the feature that turns off video recording when you're at home that's kind of ridiculous to me I mean what if a couple robbers team up for the classic you make sure they stay in the garden while I empty out the house strategy I guess I don't need footage of that when it comes time to report it for police right now so in conclusion while Dropcam solves some of my original complaints about network cameras yeah those ones it really is amazingly easy to use I mean here look I'll log into it right now you can go from not being logged in to being logged in and live monitoring your camera or reviewing your DVR CVR excuse me in that much time zoom in zoom out it's really easy to use sadly it's yet another device designed to deliver as little functionality as it can unless you're willing to fork out what I really think is an unreasonable amount of money for the subscription but honestly I don't blame drop cam for any of this for over a span of let's say three years charging each customer $500 to maintain seven days of recorded video from a camera that isn't weather resistant is powered by USB for some inexplicable reason and becomes nothing more than a fancy baby monitor the instant that they stop paying for the subscription drop cam saw customers paying 30 to 50 bucks a month for much less useful home alarm systems they delivered a better product saw amazing success and got bought out good for nope the one that I blame is the other consumer networking and video surveillance companies who had years to get their act together and deliver something that works half decently and couldn't manage to do it so now we have this it works I just think it's too expensive speaking of things that work half decently and aren't too expensive and let you watch videos Hulu Plus that was WOW that was a terrible segue anyway the plus part of Hulu Plus is key compared to regular Hulu this gives you access to all currencies and episodes of a bunch of Network TV shows on your own schedule and lets you stream videos on pretty much any device you already own like your iPad or Roku Hulu Plus gives you access to more obscure stuff like Korean dramas kids shows in Criterion movies so you can be watching an anime like sword out online then switch over to the latest episode of a network TV show like bones all within the same service you'll also get access to originals that you can't get anywhere else like the awesomes created by Seth Meyers and Mike shoemaker an animated comedy about a misfit group of superheroes all 10 episodes of season 1 are available now and season 2 premieres on August the 4th so guys be sure to check out Hulu Plus using my link Hulu Plus TOCOM slash Linus to get a free two week trial it costs only $7.99 a month once you're done with the two-week trial and if you use the link in the video description again that's Google Plus Thomas Linus you get that extra week free since they actually give you a one-week trial for free no matter who you are even if you sign up without a code but two weeks is better than one week right yeah unless it's community service for that time that you anyway I both they're talking about thanks for watching the video guys like if you like dislike if you disliked leave a comment tell me am I being unreasonable is $10 a month totally fine and making you add pay more with each one I mean is it just a matter of well Linus it's that much better than everything else so you know that's why I'd love to hear from you guys do you have a drop can what do you think of it let's just leave it at that there's a support us link in the video description where you guys can buy a t-shirt give us a monthly contribution or change your Amazon bookmarks to one that gives us a little kick back whenever you buy I don't know dropcam's or whatever else here is you're buying on Amazon and I think that's pretty much it as always don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already you