There’s certainly a trend to gadgets that can be connected to your smart home network, but not all such devices are really useful or provide the sort of features you’d expect. In my opinion, connecting security cameras is one of the use cases that make more sense, than some other gadgets. Today I want to show you the Nooie Cam 360 which combines modern design and useful features.
The press agency from Nooie was kind enough to send us a sample of the Cam 360 model from their smart camera portfolio, so we were fortunate to actually test this product out in detail for some time, rather than just reporting off the specs of their website. If you’re wondering if a $49.99 (MSRP) smart cam like the Nooie Cam 360 would be a good fit for your IoT-enabled smart home environment, then read right on.
Nooie seeks to provide solutions to consumers with a focus on what they call “warm tech”. By that, they mean natural designs, inspired by pebbles and pottery, and gadgets that fit into your homes in a non-intrusive way. They present themselves to offer higher quality than their competitors at a much better price point. Next to smart cameras and video-enabled smart doorbells, they also smart plugs, strips, and light bulbs that can integrate into your smart home setup.
Testing out the Nooie Cam 360
We tested out the Nooie Cam 360 with both Alexa and Google Home. You will need to first register your product via the Nooie app in their cloud, but from there on, you are able to connect the device with Amazon and/or Google, if you wish to make use of the smart home functions. One thing that I liked doing was to stream the live feed of the Nooie Cam 360 onto my smart TV by just telling my smart home assistant to do so.
What can you do with the Nooie Cam 360? You can place it anywhere where you’d like to keep an eye open. That could be indoors, to watch your pets or kids, or something else. You could also set it up near the entrance to work as a security cam. Nooie also offers outdoor cameras but they do not suggest that the Cam 360 should be used outside. I would keep it indoors only and use the ones that are designed for outdoor use in case you want to tape your garden, yard, or main entrance from outside.
You can check in to the feed by using the Nooie app on your smartphone from anywhere, control the camera (pan and tilt), or use the two-way audio to speak and hear through the camera. If you want to operate the camera in dark areas, this will also be no problem, since the night mode of the Nooie Cam 360 works rather well.
You can put an SD card into the cam to record footage or connect the Nooie cloud storage (AWS). Both of these options work great if you want to record video clips, but even without, you can always use the camera to access the live feed and if you’re on the mobile app, you can also take screenshots or make video captures that are stored locally on your phone.
The camera supports motion tracking, motion detection, as well as sound detection. So you could certainly also use it as a security camera. It gives you a little bit of peace of mind when you’re not at home, to just have a look remotely, and see that everything is still there and unharmed. There are even some use cases I could think of beyond security. I liked to use it as well to check on my ant farm. Using the pan and tilt functions as well as using the digital zoom enabled me to have a look anywhere without actually going there. I’m sure that works even better with larger pets like cats and dogs. It will likely also work great for monitoring babies in their cribs.
Any negative remarks?
There are just a few things that I didn’t like so much about the Nooie Cam 360 and you might even dismiss them entirely, but for transparency, I wanted to share the pros and cons with you all. From a technical point of view, I would have preferred a camera with an optical zoom lens, rather than relying only on digital zoom. I understand that there have to be compromises to keep the product price competitive, but it would have been nice to have. The device does not support wifi on 5 GHz but to be fair, this is the case for most smart home products and if you’re already managing a smart home, then you are likely to have accounted for a 2.4 GHz access point already and won’t be facing issues.
The last thing about the cons to mention is that the smart home connectivity is a little buggy, just like with many smart home devices out there. Endpoints become inaccessible by other smart home controllers and need to be reconfigured once in a while. For instance, at the start of the test, the Google Assistant had no trouble finding and stream the video from the camera on any smart display, but after a few weeks, it could no longer do that, even though the network or the device did not change. This is a general smart home networking problem as of now, and I hope that such issues, not only affecting this smart camera but all endpoints in a network, will become more reliable in the near future.
Technical specifications of the Nooie Cam 360
Of course you get the specs from us as well. You can always visit their homepage for details and comparisons to other models but here are the facts.
- Dimensions: 124.4 x 78 x 68mm
- Weight: 259g
- Field of view: 101°
- Resolution: 1080p
- Framerate: 15 FPS
- IR night vision range: 10m (32ft)
- Power source: DC 5V 1A
- Wireless: 802.11 b/g/n 2.4 GHz (does not support 5 GHz network)
- Storage: MicroSD Card (class 6 or above, from 4G to 128G) or Cloud (7 days, 15 days, 30 days)
- OS compatibility: Android 4.4+, iOS 8.0+
Summary
Taking all of this into account, I think that the Nooie Cam 360 offers really useful features well beyond their price range and maybe could even defeat the specs of more pricey models of the competition. If you want to compare all prices and solutions yourself, you can have a look at the Nooie shop on Amazon, as well as the storefronts from Ring, Blurams, and Wyze. To me, Nooie seems like a solid solution with fair pricing and a good design.
YouTube: Nooie Cam 360 Introduction – 360-degree Motion Tracking Smart Home WiFi Indoor Security Camera
YouTube: Day By Day – Nooie Cam 360
Photo credit: The feature image has been taken by Pupu Liang for TechAcute. The product images in the body of the article have been provided by Nooie for press usage.
