Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsPoorly designed, avoid
Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2017
This is a poorly designed monitor and you are strongly advised to reconsider purchasing it..
The hardware is attractive and has a few helpful features for using a camera due monitoring, but are poorly designed as a baby monitor.
First, the standard base is just a flat plate. Since you shouldn't put it in the crib with the baby, you will either use the monitor from an elevated position, far away from the baby or be required to purchase the wall mounting clip. I chose the former option as I still didn't want cables dangling over the crib, and this mode of use really cuts down on the effective resolution of the video.
Second, and most annoyingly, the apps for Android and iOS are disgraceful. They crash constantly and do not produce similar results on different operating systems. Support from the company translates to advice to improve your Wi-Fi connection speed, which does not help when you have poorly designed and poorly maintained applications. For example, on the iPhone, if you zoom in, you lose the ability to pan. If you return to the app after the motion alert is triggered, there is no video.
The sensitivity settings are not useful. On the iOS version there are five different markings for sensitivity but only three actual settings. All of them are too sensitive. A slight movement by the baby triggers the alert. Another blatantly omitted feature... If I am in the room to tend to a crying baby, how come there is no easy way to turn off the alert so that my phone does not go off constantly in my pocket... when I am in the room. The only way to do that quickly is to pull the power cord out of the device or navigate three levels through the options to silence the alert triggers.
Also, why must the alert levels be the same level on every user's device? My wife and I can have different thresholds and perhaps we don't want to both be notified for every jerk.
I also take issue with the video and picture taking capability. A device in my house snapping pictures of my child somehow produces pictures that are forever watermarked with a 'shared by ibaby'. I am sorry ibaby, that's not your property; stop ruining the photos. My Canon camera does not drop a Canon logo in the bottom right of every frame, but why do you think you should?
The support I received for continual availability issues are laughable. Unlike a traditional monitor, there is no guard against false positives! If the app cannot connect to the monitor (yes, I know, to the ibaby cloud), you simply get no notifications, rather than being informed that there may be an issue. Ignorance with a baby is not the default option I would choose.
In the end we bought a Philips Advent audio monitor, which we use constantly, and the ibaby is an overpriced security camera in the baby's room.
