Arlo Baby - Smart HD Surveillance Camera (Discontinued by Manufacturer)

I will update this review in the next several weeks as we just received Arlo Baby this evening. As a preface, we have a 3200 sq ft home with UniFi wireless APs on each floor. Getting the right wifi infrastructure in place was critical with four kids, a wife whose a pro photographer and myself who works from home for a cloud software company.The Arlo Baby is well packaged and easy to configure. A firmware update was available which was applied immediately. I mounted the camera above our sons crib with the supplied mounting disk.We have seven Arlo cams at two locations (our home and my wife's studio.). The load time in these cams varies and can be laggy. The Arlo Baby loads within 3 seconds, and the video is a second or two behind. Notifications are instantaneous though I've turned them off.To provide a more traditional user experience I've setup an old kindle with the Arlo app, which works great.All told, much, much better than our Summer Infant camera which will go in the drawer for when we travel.

**5/26/17** I returned it, could not rely on the camera at all and at that price point it was too expensive to wait for updates and reliability.**UPDATE** 24 hours later, have to keep resetting the camera since it keeps losing connection, 1 more star down. Hopefully Netgear will send a fix out soon.So I haven't had an extensive amount of use to really give the camera any plausible rating hence the 3 stars so I will go over what I have discovered so far and will give you all a update after some more use.Packaging: The box is sturdy and the camera comes packaged really well. Camera is snug inside the box and all the extras come inside another box.....inside the box, which seemed a bit excessive since all you get is the power cord, wall mount/screws and documentation plus a sticker.Setup: This is where the camera lost a star. I followed the setup prompts via the Arlo app which were straight forward. Plug camera in, amber light blinks, press sync, connect wifi and scan the QR code by pointing it at the camera. All of which was easy but the device failed to sync/connect multiple times. Finally after about an hour of fidgeting with it I read online that if your wifi router has the 2.4ghz and 5.0ghz options there was an issue with connecting using your phone since it runs under 2.4ghz so try using the computer to set the camera up. Long story short I had to factory reset the camera and run the setup using the computer to get it to work which failed until I ran the setup and the pushed the WPS button on the router as the camera was syncing and voila! it worked. Took just over an hour to figure all this out which was frustrating and the manual that came with the camera didn't explain this at all.Camera: If you have owned any Arlo camera (I have the Gen 1 outdoor cameras) then you already know what it can do plus a few added extras. I will get to the obvious which most of the other reviews from owners have already complained about. Latency, yup there is about a 3-5 second delay depending on your WiFi signal. There is no option to run this camera through an Ethernet cord so there will always be some type of lag. We have a Samsung SmartCam and that camera has the same problem over WiFi but I can connect the SmartCam directly to the router via an Ethernet cord to eliminate the lag if my router was installed in the baby's room from which I imagine most people would probably not consider because of the flashing lights etc...from the router. This is something everyone will deal with if you don't mind a small amount of lag. It is not a deal breaker for me.Features: There is a night light on the back which is cool, not very bright and you can set a timer and have it change colors on its own or choose a fixed color. The Air quality sensor is ok, lets you know Temp/Humidity/Air quality, it says in the manual it takes about 24 hours for the sensor to adjust and I haven't had it long enough to accurately review that feature. Two way audio and lullabies are a good feature, you can add your own music or lullabies, record your own voice etc...there is only about 20MB of storage though so it has to be a short clip but you can run each song on a loop and set an auto off timer as well. The LED light on the front is bright enough to be a night light on its own and flashes when the camera is recording, I was relieved that I could turn it off via the app because my two year old kept letting me know there was a light on when we were putting him down for the night. You can also unplug the camera and move it around the house since it has a rechargeable battery but no clue on how long it will last off the cord.Recording: Here is where the camera lost a star and Netgear lost some cool points. The camera will only record if there is motion or sound which the sensitivity can be adjusted. The problem is you cannot continuously record, well, you can but that will cost you another $100 a year for 14 days of storage or $200 a year for 30 days of storage. For a camera that costs $250 Netgear could have added a memory card port and let me continuously record all I want.My initial feelings about the camera are mixed, I want to like it since I dropped $250 on it but the adult in me is saying why did you do that. Only time will tell if the price tag was worth it, if Netgear fixes the lag issue more people would be happy about using it but until then there might be another camera you want to compare this one against before dropping the dough on it. To me that isn't to much of a factor since I don't solely rely on the camera for the safety of my kids. I will update as time goes on and I have had more time to evaluate the camera.

UPDATE 05/23/17So my assumption that nothing would be done in the near future appears to have been unfounded. The next day/evening the connection appeared to be much more stable and the constant switching off of night mode had ceased. I was a little apprehensive that it was mere luck/coincidence but everything has been much more stable for the past couple of days. I then received an email today from Arlo stating that a new firmware update had been applied to mitigate many of the issues that I and other people had been listing. It definitely seems to have worked if this is the case. They mentioned the lag issues and that they were working on it so i imagine they will improve on this over time.The reaction to the problems has been impressively quick and it looks like these issues were just teething problems for a new product that needed real world exposure to find out a bunch of issues. I remain a little apprehensive but for now I am upgrading my rating from 2* as the product I am using now is night and day from the one I had to suffer a few days ago. I will update again if there are any further improvements or problems but am cautiously optimistic now. Regarding the environment monitor I am still unsure as to the accuracy. Obviously difficult for me to judge the air quality and humidity, but temperature I am keeping an eye on as this still seems a little off anecdotally.Thumbs up to Arlo for the quick response and good communication.ORIGINAL REVIEWThis could be a wonderful product. There isn't really anything else on the market that I can see that is a baby specific web based monitor. Setup was easy and the app interface is nice. The hardware seems well made and the environment monitors are a nice touch although their accuracy has yet to be determined. I was a bit suspicious of the temperature monitor since noticeable temperature changes in the baby's room when the air-conditioning was turned on barely registered in the app.Unfortunately the product does not seem to be ready for primetime and I have had a bunch of problems with it since it arrived. The lag issue that everyone mentions is about 3 seconds for me in a 1 bedroom apartment with a relatively new Fios router. It doesn't bother me that much and am sure this will be improved upon as time goes by, but obviously isn't ideal. The major problem I have is with connectivity and the night vision. I have had a bunch of dropped connections and recently the camera has not been able to maintain the night vision mode for more than a minute. It looks like it switches to regular mode, essentially giving me a pitch black screen in a dark room.I've reset the app a bunch of times and also the device once and the problem still persists. Essentially it is not fit for purpose right now. I'm not sure if it is solely and software fix, I hope so. I doubt there will be a fix any time soon so I will give it a few more days and if no improvement will be returning it.