SMART SECURITY
Protect your home and monitor visitors from your smartphone with the latest connected security cams…
Of all the connected home kit out there, perhaps smart security is the most useful, giving you an ‘always- on’ way of monitoring your home — inside and out — wherever you are in the world.
But what should you be looking for? There are a raft of security cameras out there; but some are much smarter than others. Possibly the smartest range of security cams are from Netatmo. Both have some pretty remarkable features for monitoring your home. What do we mean? Well, in the Netatmo Welcome (£ 199), the company’s indoor security cam, there’s facial recognition, so if it’s just your wife and kids wandering around the house you won’t get an alert sent to your smartphone. If it detects a stranger, it’ll notify you straight away. And in the excellent app you can see a timeline of who the camera has detected. It’ll even send you a notification if it hears an alarm – say smoke or carbon monoxide. Plus, the camera only records when something happens, preventing hours of pointless empty footage.
Moving to outdoors, Netatmo has done it again with its newer cam – the Presence. Looking very much like an outdoor light (it functions as one and connects like one as well) the Presence has some really cool tricks up its sleeve. The fact that it can differentiate between a person, car or animal is one — you’ll get a notification specifying what sort of object it’s detected — and then you can live stream to your smartphone to see exactly what’s going on.
You can also specify alert zones via the app, so when someone or something enters that zone, you’ll get a notification. However, if you want to catch up on what happened during the day in a minute, you can thanks to the timelapse function. It ain’t cheap at £250, but for peace of mind it’s definitely worth it.
Never worry about home security again!