Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsGreat concept, but completely broken functionality.
Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2017
After a little over 2 weeks with 3 Arlo Pro cameras, I have to say I do not trust these cameras to do their job and protect my property. These cameras promise a lot of versatility and offer some great features. If they worked as intented, they would be phenomenal. The issue is that they very very rarely work as intended. I repeatedly encounter significant issues that render the cameras nearly useless for their intended purpose (on-event-triggered recording and video monitoring of my property).
I'm going to start with the issues I'm encountering, but I WILL follow up with what I like about these cameras (which is still certainly a strong list). I should also clarify that I'm an Android phone user, so any app issues may be specific to the Android version; I can't say for sure if they also apply to the iPhone version.
Firstly: The geofencing feature is completely buggy and barely functional. I will be sitting on my couch with my phone in my hand and over a 5 minute period, the geofencing will change from Home to Away mode several times. I have not moved. My phone's connectivity and location detection settings have not changed. But the geofencing keeps switching modes. This is extremely frustrating and completely breaks the cameras usefulness as it will change the event detection settings from what they should be based on my location. Fortunately, I do not have geofencing freak out when I'm NOT at home (e.g. when actually away, the cameras stay in Away mode) which is at least a sort of safe fail mode. But it's still broken and not performing as advertised.
Secondly: I'm being frustrated with a completely incomprehensible PERSISTENT notification from the Arlo app that tells me that "You are not connected to the Internet." Not only does this notification fail to explain WHAT is not connected to the internet (my phone? The base station? One or more of the cameras? All of the above?), but it is also completely inaccurate. Every single time this notification has appeared, I have been able to launch the app, connect to my cameras, and view to my heart's content. But making it even MORE irritating is the fact that this notification can NEVER be cleared. Even once whatever connectivity issue the app thinks it detected is clearly resolved, it persists. The ONLY WAY TO CLEAR IT IS TO FORCE CLOSE THE ARLO APP. This is so broken it's insane. Why is this notification persistent at all? None of the others are? It might make sense if the notification was actually useful, but it has never EVER been useful. EVER. And I've seen it dozens upon dozens of times. In two weeks.
Thirdly: exacerbating the irritation of the broken geofencing and nonsense "not connected to the Internet" issues is the app's lack of granular notification controls. ALL notifications from the app, be they system, event/recording alerts, geofencing alerts, mode changes, or ANYTHING, all use the same notification tone and icon. This means that thanks to the truly insane number of useless geofencing and "not connected to the internet" alerts I see, I basically don't pay attention to notifications from the app anymore. Because I get easily tenfold more nonsense broken-feature-triggered alerts than actually camera event alerts.
Particularly in light of the excellent nested-condition mode and alerting configuration options within this app (more on that when I discuss what I like about these cameras), it seems insane to me that there's no way to tie separate notification sounds to different alerts or modes as well as to different system notifications (or to at least separate system notifications from event notifications).
Fourthly: Also on the subject of notifications, the Event Detection notifications are completely inconsistent in their clickability. Sometimes I'll get a notification that a camera has detected motion and, upon tapping it, be taking to the log-in screen of the app and then the recording for that event. Other times, tapping the notification does absolutely nothing, and I have to launch the application manually and then find the event in the list manually. How is this kind of inconsistent behavior even possible? So spectacularly broken.
Fifth: These cameras and their software lack detection zones (e.g. the ability to select areas of the camera's overall view to either include in or remove from motion detection). This means that you have to be very careful how you aim them (especially when outdoors) or you will get a lot of false positive alerts on motion detection. Each of my cameras has in its view either trees or hedges. I have had to do a lot of tweaking on motion sensitivity, but there's no way to eliminate all false positives without reducing detection so far that REAL positives are missed. Having the ability to block out foot-traffic areas of the cameras view from the background for motion detection would make these cameras much more dependable as event-triggered devices (which is the only way they operate; due to the battery powered nature, there's no continual record mode--even when on USB power).
And lastly: The Arlo app scales from fairly responsive to completely useless. Sometimes, I can launch the app and quickly jump into any live camera view or alerted camera view. Other times, I am greeted with nothing more than a spinning "loading" circle. There's now way to force a "retry" and since the app runs in the background, the only way to fix this is to force close and try again, hoping you have better luck. When viewing an alert in urgent circumstances, this is hardly ideal. It's also frustration compounding in a very special kind of way when the Geofencing starts freaking out, and I attempt to launch the app to see what's going on, only to be greeted with an endlessly spinning circle. Broken compounded with broken.
Now, as to what I like:
The programmability of alerting, detection, and recording is exemplary. You can create a variety of modes and then nest them by referring them to each-other conditionally.
For instance, I have my geofencing mode pointing to a scheduled mode, which in turn points to multiple static modes. When at home, I get one set of behaviors at some hours and different behaviors at other hours. While away, I get yet a different set of behaviors. I could select any of these static modes as the current "active" mode, or I can chose to refer to them conditionally with other modes as desired. It's very easy to configure and the specific sub-settings (such as motion sensitivity) are unique to each mode, allowing for a huge degree of variability between modes. This basically means I can leave my house in a highly-monitored state, but still have my front door watched while I'm home during the day and then switch to more active full-yard monitoring at night when nobody should be in my yard.
It is also possible to trigger recording on one camera from an event on another camera, meaning you can record multiple perspectives of an event even if only one camera detects motion or sound.
The truly-wireless nature of the cameras means I can mount them in places that might be impractical or less-than-aesthetically-ideal otherwise. The base station also has quite a decent range. I have the cameras covering about a third of an acre from the outside in and have not had any connectivity issues, which is extra impressive considering that the cameras link with the base station over the extremely interference-prone 2.4GHz spectrum via WiDi. There's also very little compression artifacting in the camera feed (only showing up when things get very busy on-camera), though it's worth noting that I have all my cameras set to "highest quality" mode, rather than the balanced mode or battery-focused mode, so that may change with difference modes.
The cameras are quite small and the optional weather-hooded sleeves add more color options, meaning they can be quite discrete even when mounted in clear view. I have yet to have anybody spot the cameras before having them pointed out, and mine are not in well-hidden locations.
IR night vision range is quite solid and pretty glare-free. In fact, while the manual recommends against pointing the cameras in the direction of windows, I experience no glare or washing out despite having all 3 of my cameras aimed at a house with IR-reflective-tinted windows. A nice bonus is that each camera will activate its own IR lighting, meaning that if two cameras have a view that overlaps, illumination is particularly bright. And since it's possible to trigger multiple cameras to record from a single event, this actually comes into useful practice quite frequently.
The audio recording is a nice touch, but all my cameras experience enough background hiss that it's not really very useful for recording from any kind of distance. I am experimenting with disabling microphone audio on certain cameras to improve battery life.
If Netgear can fix the major functionality glitches, I will LOVE these cameras. As they stand, I will most likely be requesting a refund.
