Gadgetory

these days it's not terribly hard to set up a camera in your home and nests recent acquisition of Dropcam last year shows that people are pretty interested in doing so well what happens if you take that just one step further you wind up with the guardzilla and all-in-one home security system i'm our percenter with TechnoBuffalo let's see if the guardzilla really is the king of the cams I was really excited to review this thing as you might have seen in my videos I have two dogs and we've been looking for a way to watch them when we're not home they have a tendency to get into some naughty behaviors so I headed home with the guardzilla and I excitedly told my wife all cool things that it did and I was really really stoked I plugged it in opened up the app after downloading it and I was greeted with this this is this is what the guardzilla app looks like on Android and it doesn't look all that much better on iOS so I'm standing there thinking to myself oh god this is not looking good already but I talked to myself like okay got to give this thing a fair shake so I set aside how awful it looked I went ahead with the setup it was fairly straightforward enough to set up and once I was able to do it I was able to see the feed from the camera on my phone while I was on the same network but as soon as I change the quality level on the camera from medium to max it stopped working altogether and it took completely uninstalling the guardzilla app in order to get it working again that was pretty representative of the kind of experience that the guardzilla offers the device itself the hardware is fine I guess it's not terribly unassuming so it's definitely gonna look a little weird in your living room it's got this like black sort of weird alien feel it does have a micro SD card slot on the back for capturing a few days of video at a time but the video quality is like really bad terrible security camera footage when you put that side-by-side with video from a Dropcam it's astoundingly bad like really bad here I'll show you some video from the guardzilla versus some video from here in the TechnoBuffalo office where a handful of our colleagues fell over while playing around and that was taken on a drop cam everything on this thing from the app to the hardware is just well below par and it's just so disappointing I I genuinely wasn't able to get it working for long enough to be able to test out some of the more robust features of the thing like motion sensing or pet ignoring motion sensing it'll pay attention to it to your pets and it won't set off the motion sensor if it knows that it's them it's got an alarm siren and it's got Auto arming because the thing is intended to be a security device the thing is just the app is so poorly designed and developed that the password field things like this the password field is revealed by default the login asks for four different fields of information to log you in and logging in with another phone is an affair that demands that you're on the same Wi-Fi network ask the camera itself so if you're out or someone uses multiple phones like I do and you're not connected to your Wi-Fi network you can't log in to the guardzilla service seriously if you guys know me well enough which I think at this point you should you'll know that I'm a pretty savvy guy so it takes something pretty bad for me to not be able to get it working properly if you're in the market for something in this vein do yourself a favor spend the extra 80 bucks and get a drop pan given that it's only a hundred bucks I suppose I can't really expect all that much but I'm certainly not going to be using this thing as a camera in my home much less as an actual security measure bottom line redesign your app man redesign it from the ground up then try again I'm sorry it wasn't a terribly positive review this time around you guys but they can't all be winners thank you guys so much for watching if you enjoyed this video you can go and hit that like button down below of course you can also subscribe if you'd like our intern ibin here to accompany me to your house for a fun choir of singing otherwise again thank you guys for watching be kind to one another and I'll catch you in the next video