An Arlo Baby with 7″ touchscreen display just popped up on Best Buy for $350, which represents a $100-150 premium over the Arlo Baby itself. Like all Netgear Arlo products, the camera feed can be viewed from both Apple and Android devices, so what’s obviously new and notable here is the bundled tablet. Sadly, the production description doesn’t provide a whole lot of insight – but here are the relevant bits:
This Arlo Baby monitoring system includes a 7-inch touch-screen display for real-time footage viewing.
The 7″ color LCD display lets you clearly see the full-motion video to ensure your little one is safe.
I’m just going to go ahead and assume it’s a heavily skinned and slimmed down lower-resolution Android affair. But, really, the bigger question is: Will this product actually see the light of day? While there’s been a year of display-related chatter, to compete with the traditional baby monitors, Arlo staff recently posted a note to their forums suggesting they’ve pulled the plug:
We wanted to let you know that we no longer plan to release a dedicated display monitor. Instead, we are offering people who bought an Arlo Baby a $30 coupon for an Amazon Fire HD 8 Tablet (16GB, With Special Offers), redeemable on Amazon.com. We think this tablet is a great alternative to the Arlo Baby Touchscreen Display. It works great with the Arlo app, offers great image and audio quality, and is Alexa-enabled so you can take advantage of the voice control capability offered by Amazon Alexa. If you would like to take advantage of this offer, please reach out to the Arlo Customer Support team.
So is the Arlo display truly dead? Or will it not be offered as a stand-alone product?
We bought our baby monitor (a different brand that I wouldn’t buy again because of fact that we’re on our 3rd (free warranty replacements) in 2 years) specifically because we could use our existing devices as a display and not need to carry around an additional display. I certainly think that their suggestion of getting a dirt cheap Kindle Fire would make far more sense than spending an extra $100 for a stand-alone device if you didn’t want to use your own.
I’m the least productive mommy blogger ever, so readers are probably not up to speed on my situation. While we often exhibit the behavior of neurotic first-time parents, when it comes to video in the nursery we’ve been surprisingly low-key. From early on we rotated a Samsung camera and the Arlo Q in and out, but didn’t heavily lean on them (compared to the gifted Avant audio monitor which is always on, although now on a very low volume). Arlo Q spun up slower than Samsung but the app and night vision are better and camera had better digital zoom (up to 8X)… until they removed it from the iOS app last May. The functionality returned this past March, but I just gave the Q to a pal and re-purposed a surplus wire-free Arlo that is magnetically attached to her closet door hinge. I think we’ve only turned it on twice.
Here’s a 6-month pic from the comparison I never wrote up. :)
https://twitter.com/davezatz/status/742144848740950016