Smart Home

The Amazon Echo Button Tease

As with so many things ‘Alexa’ the Amazon Echo Buttons, at a mere $14 for two, are tantalizing close to greatness. Initially introduced as a gaming accessory (meh), the Alexa platform was updated a few weeks ago to allow the buttons to trigger smart home routines. Awesome! Or so I thought. It turns out the … Read more

Amazon Alexa Grows Up

For those looking to automate their homes, the Amazon Alexa platform took great strides this week with significant “Routine” enhancements. While some were fired up by location-based triggers, I can’t say I’ve experienced consistent reliability over the years with geofencing. However, two new conditions make all the difference as I look to standardize on a … Read more

Arlo Goes 4K (for a price)

The mysterious Arlo Gen 5 discovered last month has been revealed as the Arlo Ultra. And, based on an early 2019 release date, missed an anticipated holiday launch. Not only has Arlo’s styling been enhanced, the Ultra is more powerful on all fronts — with 4K video, wider field of view, dual microphones, and a built-in … Read more

Arlo Pet Tracker To Intelligently Monitor Furry Friends

Along with the new Arlo Gen 5 wirefree camera, the Netgear spinoff is also poised to unveil a somewhat curious pet tracker. As they already promote pet-friendly video monitoring, perhaps this collar tag isn’t an entirely unusual pivot… And, as one Twitter buddy suggests, it’ll likely integrate with the Arlo video line to include/exclude those … Read more

Amazon Recalls Bricked Cloud Cam(s)

Can’t tell you how many devices this applies to, but Amazon wants my buddy’s Cloud Cam back.

About two weeks ago, he had told me the WiFi camera died. He attempted a factory reset, but no love. He hadn’t found time or energy to follow-up with Amazon when, out of the blue, he received a voicemail and an email “message from Amazon’s Engineering Team” (device-recovery@amazon.com) this week stating:

I was calling to talk about one of your Cloud Cam devices. I’d like to get you a replacement Cloud Cam device as soon as possible at no additional cost to you. Additionally, I would like to schedule a pick-up to have the original device delivered to our lab for analysis.

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Arlo Baby Display … Is Or Isn’t Happening?

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:

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Ooma Preps Office Phone

As so many of us have replaced both land and VoIP lines with cellular service, and given the telco-cable incumbents largely cornering the residential VoIP market, Ooma appears to have successfully expanded their telephonic services into business sector. And now, via the FCC, we learn Ooma intends to similarly expand their hardware into Cisco and … Read more