If you’ll be traveling for the holidays, you can keep tabs on what is going on at home and be alerted to any unexpected motion with the easy-to-use AnkerCam HD WiFi camera.

PROs

• Picture quality: The video quality is in impressive 720P HD and allows you to see a lot of detail of what’s going on. The wide angle lens also covers a wide area. For example, I can view most of my front porch when mounted and pointing out my window.
• Easy setup: This camera has a unique setup process that I haven’t seen before. You connect the camera via USB to your computer and it shows up as a standard flash drive. Then, you open the AnkerCam “drive” and launch the PC or Mac setup program (sorry, no Linux setup available). This program” essentially routes you to the AnkerCam website with a unique identifier for the camera and allows you to complete the setup process online. The camera will scan for nearby WiFi and you select your network, provide your network password, and you’re good to go.
• Motion alerts: You can setup motion detection alerts in the app. The alerts are sent via push notifications to your smartphone.
• 20 second recordings: Whenever motion is detected, a 20 second video clip is saved to the cloud. You can then open up the app and tap one of the highlighted events on the timeline to watch a clip of what caused the alert to be triggered. Recordings are saved to the cloud and can be downloaded to your phone as needed.
• Night vision: There are infrared lights on the camera that allows it to “see in the dark” in black and white. But please note that this will not work through glass or out a window.
• Push to talk: You can also enable the microphone on your phone and talk through the camera’s built-in speaker if you need to get in contact with someone at the camera’s location.

CONs

• No traditional MJPEG stream: For those techies out there that would like to be able to view this camera in a different app or integrate it in a home monitoring web page, I couldn’t find a MJPEG stream or video streaming URL for this camera. If you locate one, please let me know!
• White cable with black camera: I’m stumped why the black camera includes a white power cable. Thankfully, it’s a standard Micro USB cable and you can easily use your own if you wish.
• Flash: The web interface requires the Adobe Flash plugin in order to view live video and recordings.

Overall, I really like how easy this camera was able to setup. The picture quality is also really good and in HD, allowing you to see a lot of detail in the image. I also like that recordings are backed up to the cloud, but I’m a little bummed by the lack of local functionality (no local streaming and no local recording).

Check out the AnkerCam on Amazon

— Discounted sample provided for review