THE ALTERNATIVES
That motion detection is a key part of Arlo’s appeal – it’s packed with clever detection, options and ways to use them smartly. It can differentiate between humans, animals, general motion and it can even spot packages. This all proved fairly accurate in our time with the cameras. You can also set motion zones, so that if your front camera is facing a public place, you can exclude that from the detection, and only get notifications if people come into your garden, say.
There’s a huge amount of power to customise how you want these cameras to operate within the app, which is both the Arlo’s strength and a slight weakness. It’s extremely easy to set them up (we actually had a glitch during setup, but it all fixed itself without any intervention), and then set simple modes such as arming for motion detection when you’re away from home, and turning off when you’re back. But we created a system where even at home, we still got notifications of people coming to our front door, so we wouldn’t miss packages during isolation. It worked great… but we had to google how to do it, because we wouldn’t have guessed how it worked in the app alone. When you know what you’re doing, the possibilities are glorious… but there’s a learning curve to things beyond the more basic.
Making full use of smart features also requires an Arlo subscription, though this is $4.49 per month, which is not unreasonable. It comes with a three-month trial, which is also pretty good.
Scrub the hub?
A key part of the Arlo system is the hub, which the cameras connect to, rather than your Wi-Fi. The hub plugs into your router, and handles multi-camera management and cloud connectivity, and in this version enables Apple HomeKit support.
It does its job well, but it adds expense, and does have a downside: the Arlo camera we put at the back of the house had a limited connection to the hub – it worked, but was slower to respond. But we have a big mesh Wi-Fi network – if it had been on the Wi-Fi instead of its own connection, this wouldn’t have been the case.
Everything else the cameras promised proved to work well, too –