Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsWarning! the battery will die and then you must throw it out
Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2023
I liked this camera initially. The camera quality is clear, it supports a simultaneously recording rear camera. I had it professionally installed. Initially I thought I made a good buy. Fast forward over a year (outside of warranty of course) and it's shown itself to be literal trash. Skip to the end for the summary if you're pressed for time, I can't recommend anyone buy this.
It sat in my vehicle quietly (except for the beeps you can do nothing about when starting and stopping) doing it's job for many months - or so I thought. I finally had a need to pull some video from the camera for an insurance claim. First of all, the app is horrendous, it needs to establish a wifi connection to do anything with video on the device but the connection is slow to establish and your phone will connect to any other wifi (near you house? too bad. have wireless carplay? too bad.) before it finishes and then the process just hangs. So you force close the app and cycle the power on the camera and hope it completes faster next time. Once I was finally in (many tries later and after driving away from my home and disabling carplay in my vehicle) I was shocked that all the videos were from months ago with just a couple recent (as in a few minutes ago recent). What the heck?!? The very reason this things exists, to capture this important event, and it didn't do its job! Complete failure.
Lots of troubleshooting later I found the reason. The internal battery in the device had died. It didn't send any sort of notification that this happened (they have an app, you'd think that would be pretty basic to send a notification), it had just silently died months prior. This thing is hard-wired into my vehicle so you'd expect a dead battery wouldn't even matter but it turns out that without the internal battery the internal clock constantly resets. That clock is critical to determining which videos are stored and which are overwritten because it always kills the oldest videos to make room for whatever it is recording right now. Well with the clock always resetting to 1/1/2020 all the recent videos are timestamped as the oldest videos (using what the clock thinks is the current date of 1/1/2020 when at the time writing this it is September 2023) and all the oldest (really the recent, because again, wrong timestamp of 1/1/2020) are deleted to make room for the "new." Wash/rinse/repeat, the result is that you never get new videos that last more than some number of minutes.
OK, that's a pretty big design flaw but we should be able to address this, let's get a new battery installed and I'll just have to manually check battery health every month (huge hassle since there isn't a way to be notified, remember, you have to remove the camera, charge it, reset it, then time it as it burns through the charge to determine whether it's junk or not, this isn't just a matter of going to a battery health menu a la Apple and checking percentage battery life). So I call customer support to arrange for a battery replacement. I'm out of warranty so I'm expecting to pay for this but that's fine, should be fraction of the cost of a replacement camera. I speak with the nice customer support person and she informs me that they can't sell me a battery. OK, I tell her I'm fine paying them to install it for me, I'll ship them the unit. She tells me that's not a service they provide. I ask what would happen if the unit were under warranty she says THEY REPLACE THE ENTIRE UNIT. The ONLY solution they offer is complete replacement because of a dead battery, a consumable component. This is the epitome of e-waste, a $5-ish battery dies in about 18 months or so and your $400 camera is junk (plus any accessories you bought are worthless without the camera).
I tell her this sounds like they are telling me I have to throw out this $400 camera (not including the rear view camera that is going to be useless and the hard wire kit and the installation fees, we're really talking about the better part of a $1000 down the drain) because of a dead battery. She says no, she can send me the battery specs and I can get one myself. Great, I ask for the battery specs. It's not a user serviceable battery, it's only available via the Chinese equivalent of Amazon and then requires you to solder in three wires to connect it. I'm no electronics expert, this isn't something I'm going to tackle. I ask her what they do with the units they take back under warranty and she says they send them in to get refurbished. I ask if I can do the same with mine and she tells me no, they send them to the manufacturer in the UK and they do and that's not a service they can offer me.
So, long very long story short. The image quality is nice but the app is terrible and most importantly, the battery, like all batteries, will die in a little over the warranty period and when it does the only solutions are A) be an electronics expert who is comfortable buying a battery from an unknown seller in China, waiting two months for it to ship to the US, and then disassembling, soldering, and reassembling the device or B) throw it out. I'd expect that means for 99% of those reading this review this camera will be literal trash within 18 months and during that time you'll have zero warning that it may have failed and not be storing any of your critical videos just when you need them most.
I can't recommend anyone buy this unless and until Nextbase addresses these massive holes in this product. It's really a shame and in my opinion terrible business practices on the part of the US Nextbase distributor.
