One of the joys challenges of being a first-time parent is being exposed to a bewildering array of gadgets and equipment required to care for the baby, from baby car seats, strollers and diaper pails to 2-axis rocking robots (thanks Rohit!). There is an entire cottage industry of books like Baby Bargains that help you navigate through the confusing and sometimes questionable or outright unnecessary choices.
I have a Withings body weight scale that I really like and I was excited to learn they were going to release a networked video baby monitor. It took a while to get to market in the US, however, so in the interim I purchased a Philips Advent DECT digital baby monitor, which ended up unusable in practice, because its microphone sensitivity is so poor that you can barely hear anything. When the Withings baby monitor finally became available in the US, I immediately ordered it.
Withings is clearly taking design cues from Apple, from the lavishly designed packaging to the glossy white plastic RoundedRect aesthetic and the use of a magnetic clip to attach the baby monitor to the crib. The clip is serviceable, but the magnets are not quite strong enough to hold the unit firmly onto the crib. I would not trust it to keep the monitor from toppling when the baby grows and kicks at the crib. Fortunately they also include a flip-out tab on the base of the unit that can be inserted into a slit on the clip to prevent sliding, although it is not obvious and it took me a while before I discovered this key feature.
The wall wart is a generic black model with swappable AC prongs for international markets, and detracts from the overall package, but since the monitor has a micro-USB input, you can always use another adapter like the iPhone’s. A rechargeable battery is included, with 2 hours’ claimed life, I did not verify that spec.
The initial out of the box experience is good: you connect to the device from your iPhone or iPad using Bluetooth (no messing around with a USB cable as with the Withings scale), enter the WiFi settings in the Withbaby app, and then use WiFi to access the device afterwards. It is as streamlined an experience as you can expect without a keyboard on the unit. There is also an Ethernet jack (it is unclear whether it supports power over Ethernet), but my house was built in 1928 and is not wired upstairs where the baby lives.
Once you enter your credentials into the app, it connects to the monitor and shows you the video and sound. If you put it in the background, you have the option of monitoring audio. Withings will also send you alerts via push notifications if the temperature or humidity is excessive, or if it detects noise or motion. The default settings are way too twitchy, however, and you will find yourself disabling audio notifications as the deluge of alerts is just too much.
The device includes a night light with selectable color, a lullaby player, and the ability to speak to your baby, all controlled through the app. At the front you also have touch controls to turn some of these features on. This is actually a bad idea, as on two occasions I started the lullaby by accident as I was fumbling with it in a dark room, and woke up my baby as a result. Another design flaw is the pulsing blue night light when the unit is rebooting, the Airport Express like amber/green status LED in the back is quite sufficient. Frankly the only one of these features that is useful is the speaker, and the ability to stream from your music collection, such as Dr. Harvey Karp’s white noise selections would be preferable to the canned lullabies.
The video camera is advertised as having a 3 megapixel sensor. It has a wide-angle lens and you can “pan” using the usual iPhone or iPad gestures. The lens is a fixed-focus plastic one, and optical clarity is so-so at best, optimal focus seems to be at 50cm or so. One great feature is the monitor has a normal and night vision mode, similar to the one on some Sony HAD camcorders, with an IR illuminator that provides light for the night vision mode. This means you can watch your baby toss and turn in an otherwise pitch-black room.
You can use the baby monitor from outside your network, and it works fine, even over a 3G connection. Withings allows you up to 15 minutes per day, anything beyond that requires paying them $6 for each 100 minutes. Coming on top of an already expensive device, this seems like a naked money grab from anxious parents. (Updated 2012-09-29: remote monitoring is now free and unlimited).
When the unit works, it is absolutely great: good sound sensitivity and the video feature mostly works as advertised. Unfortunately it frequently does not function, and I find myself performing a hard reboot by removing the battery far more often than I would like. Among the pathologies:
- Once it falsely reported the unit was closed and thus video inaccessible
- Once the camera was in a frozen state, it took a power cycling to get the video moving again.
- Yesterday I could not connect at all, no matter how many times I rebooted my Airport Extreme, the monitor and my wife’s or my iPads. Some detective work using a packet sniffer showed the app was trying to connect to babyws.withings.net using HTTP, which is aliased to s11.withings.net, and that server was down. Some of the documentation suggests you can use the Bluetooth connection to access the monitor, but I was not able to figure out how to do this.
This brings me to a crucial point. The baby monitor is a safety device, and it is utterly unacceptable for its functioning to be dependent on a cloud service, which can and will be a single point of failure. It should use Bonjour or similar discovery methods to work on the LAN, and rely on Withings’ servers only when accessing it from outside the home LAN’s perimeter. I wonder if Withings’ eagerness to nickel-and-dime users by charging for outside monitoring led to this critical design flaw.
The bottom line is the Withings smart baby monitor is a very frustrating device, with its obvious potential marred by failures of execution. If it worked consistently, it would be a top-notch product worthy of its Apple inspiration and lofty price tag, but the general lack of reliability means I cannot recommend it until the bugs are ironed out. Consider it an alpha release at best.
Update (2012-09-17):
Here’s how to make the Withings not-so-smart baby monitor more usable:
- Remove the battery from the unit and hook up the micro-USB power adapter to a Belkin WeMo remote-controlled power switch. This allows you to power-cycle the baby monitor remotely from the same iPhone or iPad you are using the monitor software on.
- Hide the blue led with gaffer’s tape. This prevents the blue light on reboot from waking the baby. Unlike duct tape, gaffer’s tape can be removed without leaving glue residue, although the aesthetics of dark gray gaffer’s tape on the gleaming white unit are questionable at best.
- I haven’t tried covering up the touch controls with gaffer’s tape, which would eliminate the risk of triggering a jingle and waking the baby. The WeMo eliminates the need to enter the room and tinker with the baby monitor.
It’s quite sad to have to pay an extra $50 to work around buggy hardware and software, but it makes a big difference.
Hi,
I was thinking of buying this device (Withings Baby monitor) but I do have a question.
Is it possible to use this devise coupled to a “Apple Aiport Express” even if that one is not connected to the internet.
My point is, the Bluetooth range is not wide enough. I would like to use the baby monitor in other place than at home (on vacation for example) where I do not have internet access.
So I would plug an aiprot express to make a wifi network (without internet) in order to link the babymonitor with ipad or iphone.
I hope my question is understandable and I do thank you very much in advance for your reply.
Best regards,
Fabien
Unfortunately no, it won’t work without an Internet connection or if their servers are down.
Ready for a funny story? Back when I had my kids, only audio monitors were available, and those too advertised sensitivities in the megaHertz ranges. My mother was watching our son in our 3-story duplex and upon hearing the monitor go off, ran up 2 flights of stairs to check on him. He was sleeping soundly. This happened again and again he was fine. The third time, she heard a strange man’s voice sleepily trying to calm his baby. Our monitor had been picking up the voice of another child crying, somewhere down the street!
Great review! I was excited to find your website and read the review, but alas, you have convinced me that Withings has produced a failure. I’m going to have to rethink this purchase and thanks to you! Is there a firmware update to the BM? My wife and I are expecting in August.
In other news, I like the Withings scale but my current Tanita does so much more in all other counts of water weight, etc, that the lack of features doesn’t justify a new scale. I’d love the autosync but I just wished that Withings would update their scale already.
Thanks for your kind comments. I was trying to give an unvarnished view of the product, few online product sites do long-term reviews (when they even test the product, as opposed to parroting press releases).
I haven’t seen firmware updates, possibly they do this behind the scenes using their app, but it was last updated 2 months ago.
The stability of their servers seems to have improved, and I haven’t had to do a hard power-cycle in at least 3 weeks, so it is usable and we rely on it every night. About once or twice a week the app will lose its connection and not be able to automatically reconnect, requiring you to turn monitoring off and on in the app.
I have used the remote baby monitor function a couple of times to check up on the baby while she is baby-sat, and it works just fine even over what passes for 3G in San Francisco.
As for scales, the historical trend analysis functionality trumps any additional measures like body fat measurements or the like as far as I am concerned. I only care about the weight measurements.
I am having problems connecting the withings baby monitor to the wireless network and withings have not given any kind of settings the router should have…. Any one have any ideas
Ralston
You have to connect over Bluetooth first, using the app, set up the WiFi parameters, and after that connect over WiFi. If you are having problems, contact Withings support.
Have you noticed in there FAQ that remote viewing is unlimited now?
Is it possible the now the device does not have to connect to the Internet now to function?
http://www.withings.com/en/babymonitor/faq
No, thanks for bringing this to my attention, this is indeed a welcome development. I think it is still tied to their servers, however, as it stopped working when my DNS server was down, even after the recent app upgrade. The sporadic disconnection problems are still there, however.
Thats disappointing.
What if your internet goes down in the middle of the night after you have already connected? Do you get disconnected or kicked out of the app from the baby monitor?
Are there any audio alerts from the app to notify if you were disconnected after X amount of minutes?
thanks
You get a bleep and a modal dialog appears in the app. It doesn’t attempt to reconnect by itself until you dismiss the dialog, which is kind of dumb.
Have you noticed that the WithBaby app drains your iPhone/iPad battery when running in the background? I have to kill the app to preserve my battery life.
Yes, presumably that’s due to the background audio-only monitoring function of the app, and it is not smart enough to not do work in the background if that function is not activated.
I recently purchased the BM and am reasonably happy so far. The functionality is great, at home at least. However, I can only connect to the monitor via Bluetooth, or via the same wireless network that the BM is connected to. I have not been able to connect to the monitor while my iPhone is connected to another wireless network, other than the one that the BM is connected to, or via 3G. This is very disappointing as this is a huge selling featuring and is heavily advertised. Does anyone have any tips or advice to help solve this problem? Much appreciated!
Probably firewall settings. You should contact their tech support.
Here is the response from withings support on why an internet connection is required for the cam to function. Seems odd to me and doesn’t make sense.
“The first step for a user is to set up a Withings account, notbably for security reasons. Therefore, we think that it’s mandatory for the user to have an internet connection. Besides, it allows us to troubleshoot installation problem easily.”
So they want to make the baby cam have more failure points. (your isp, there servers, ect) so they can troubleshoot install problems?
thanks for the review. You saved me some money.
I have the same issues as you do. The music and light features have too often ended up waking up my baby. Clearly, this BM was designed in a lab, not a nursery. The other issue is that the micro-USB port isn’t working anymore after just a few months. Has anyone else had this issue? (Good luck trying to get the attention of Withings). Withings made a toy, not a safety tool.
am having a problem to access my baby monitor from outside my home do i need to have a static IP address in order to be able to access it from outside ???
I don’t think so. You may need to change your firewall settings, however.