In this episode, I tell you all about the Ooma Butterfleye, a smart security camera that packs in both a battery that lasts for weeks and enough on board storage to keep a bunch of clips available locally.
So let's go over all the best features to see if the Ooma Butterfleye is right for you.
This is a smart video security camera that packs some unique features that you don't really see in a lot of the competition. The Ooma Butterfleye has a lot of innovative features but there's two areas in particular that I really wanna shine a light on it because they're different and quite honestly better than a lot of other cameras you'll find out there.
Before we jump into the feature list though, let's start with the specs. The Ooma Butterfleye has a one third inch, 3.5 megapixel SEMA sensor that records in 1080p with a 120 degree field of view. It supports up to eight times digital zoom and encodes videos in the H.264 format. The 16 gigabyte model sells for $199.99 and you can get a three pack for $549.99. There's also a black 32 gigabyte model for $249.99 and you can get a three pack of those for $599.99.
Now let's talk about the features that make the Butterfleye stand out from the competition starting with battery life. When you open up the box, on the inside you'll find the Butterfleye quick start guide, a USB power adapter, the micro USB power cable that plugs in to the adapter and the Butterfleye security camera itself. Looking at the Butterfleye, what you don't see is that on the inside it's got a built in rechargeable battery. So again, you're able to plug it in to power but you also have the ability to unplug it and have run on battery power. So that means you can disconnect it from wired power and move it somewhere temporarily when you need it. For example, you might typically have it in the kids room but the kids might be at school and you're expecting a package delivery, you just take it, unplug it, point it out the window and get alerted when your package arrives.
Now the best part is that this isn't one of weaker batteries that dies in a couple of hours or even several hours, the battery inside the Ooma Butterfleye lasts up to one full month thanks to the 10,400 milliamp hour battery on the inside. Up next let's talk about the next major feature and that is storage. Obviously cloud storage is important for smart camera and just like pretty much every other smart camera maker, Ooma provides cloud storage of clips and they give you seven days of access at no additional charge.
That means that for the price of the camera, you can go back up to a week and see all clips that it captured and uploaded.
Now if you want more access than just the seven days, you can $9.99 per month which will give you 30 days of access to all your previous clips in addition to also throwing in like two way audio, auto arm and disarm based on location, facial recognition and more or if you need even more time, you could pay $29.99 for a business account and get 90 days of access to your previous clips.
Now cloud storage is convenient but there's another part to the story with the Butterfleye and that is that it ships with on board storage. 16 gigabytes in the base white model and 32 gigabytes of storage in the upgraded black version. What this means is that even if your network goes down, if the wifi is spotty or if you just wanna have quicker access to your clips, you won't lose access to your recordings because it'll save everything locally right on the camera. That's a rarity in the smart camera game. I need to give a big shout out to Ooma for packing in the storage on the Butterfleye. Up next let's talk about another one of the features on the Ooma Butterfleye that you don't really see elsewhere, sometimes you see them but the granular controls in the Ooma app make them a lot more convenient and that is Smart Alerts.
Smart Alerts on the Butterfleye are both convenient and cool. Usually, its security camera alerts will tell you only if they detect motion or sound then you have to manually go look at the clip to see what was up.
The Butterfleye will actually tell you what it thinks it saw based on different categories. These include if a moving object is a human face or a pet or detected that the camera itself was moved. And you can toggle these on a per category basis. So in other words, if you only wanna be notified if your pet jumps up on the couch and you don't wanna know if the camera was moved, or if a human walked into the room, you can do that. It also attempts to identify specific people using a proprietary facial recognition algorithm. Whenever it detects an unrecognized face, it adds it to the Faces tab access from a menu on the camera's home screen. Here it sorts them into unfamiliar and familiar faces areas. To identify an unfamiliar face, just the tap thumbnail image and enter a name and now that person will be moved into the familiar faces group. You previously identified that person, you can now just tap on a new image, tap on their previous image in the familiar faces list and select Combine to improve the recognition accuracy.
Privacy's a big deal and it's been in the news a lot over the past year or so with all the cameras and microphones that we're willingly putting into our homes. Ooma's Butterfleye offers an easy way to put the camera to sleep when you want it to stop recording stop looking for things to alert you about and it even has an automatic geo fencing mode that'll keep it in privacy mode while you're home and only turns off when you are away. The method it uses to detect where you are is your smartphone's location.
If your phone is more than 165 feet away from the Butterfleye, it will assume that you're not there. These are two optional but very powerful features. In total, the Ooma Butterfleye successfully addresses home security cameras biggest vulnerabilities. One of those is the risk of losing connection to power and the cloud and another big complaint, inundation with alerts for false alarms. As we talked about the Ooma Butterfleye addresses those with a long lasting battery, on board storage and highly customizable alerts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQvdIzPgWZI
