Smart home tech

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the unnecessarily complicated ‘smart home’? Let Stuff simplify things with our up-to-date guide to the best products, platforms and broadband advice for joining the dots of your connected abode

Worried that if you start buying connected devices they’ll lock you out of the house and burn all your clothes? Allow Stuff to show you the basics…

ideo doorbells are like embarrassing bladder conditions: we’ll probably all have one eventually. Operating over your home’s Wi-fi, they call your smartphone when someone rings the bell so you can see them on screen and have a two-way conversation, even if you’re not in; and they send alerts when they detect movement.

The appeal is obvious, in terms of both security (hey, there’s someone dodgy in the garden!) and convenience (hey, a courier’s here but I can’t get to the door because of my embarrassing bladder condition!). So, with the promise of hassle-free installation plus high-def video with HDR and night vision, this Arlo Essential might live up to its name.

TALL OR NOTHING

This is a handsome and weatherproof rival to Ring and Nest, but stands out with a 180° diagonal field of view so it won’t miss lanky people or parcels plonked on the doorstep. It scores highly for ease of installation and use, and the advantages over an old-fashioned ding-a-ling are clear, even if the image quality isn’t always: in theory the resolution is better than HD, but faces are nowhere near as sharp as that.

The real question is about value. Once your free trial runs out, Arlo Smart costs £2.49 a month – on a par with Amazon’s Ring Protect Plan (£2.50/m) and half of Google’s Nest Aware service (£5/m). The three vary in terms of features, but Arlo’s is just about essential to make the device worth owning: without it, you lose the all-important activity zones for motion detection. But if you can spare 30 quid a year, this might just be where the reign of your dirty old bell ends.