The next Nest? We talk to Ring, the doorbell-come-security system

Bed, Bath, and Beyond eh?

So I'm pretty sure I have a 20% off coupon there, however, I bet this product will be excluded.

Nice puff piece, leaves out some rather obvious questions..

Ring's connections will go through the cloud - up to Ring's servers, an authenticated hand-off and then back down to other devices. This approach however introduce its own issues - what about WiFi coverage?

What about WiFi jamming? What about reading the signal and analysing it? Why should I trust a vendor holding my data in a cloud in a country with the best intercept facilities in the world? Do I really want to trust them not to open the door for, er, "friends" when I make the mistake of adding a door lock? Is a video really deleted when I kill it, or will it be kept to see if it cannot be used for something else? How certain is it that someone cannot *add* a video to set up entrapment (etc ad infinitum).

Until we have IPv6, all devices involved in house security have to go through an external server, because most home setups run NAT to offer internal devices access to the Net. That is the weak point, and in this case I really don't want to add the capability for surveillance of who is at my house so someone *else* can then use it.

This is just one step removed from those doorlocks that "make life easy" but introduce a single point of failure into your home defence.

It's a nice device and I enjoy the beautiful engineering, but the issues are not just technology and from this article it appears they have (again) been carefully avoided to prevent them from tripping up the sales pitch.

Obvious pitfalls?

"[...] designed to protect the motion sensor but allow through heat information, [...]"

It seems like they are using a PIR detector. These usually have several problems.

1. People usually have to cross the field of view to trigger a response - rather than approaching directly.

2. With a horizontal view - the detection distance is difficult to control and responds to passing people or vehicles if the door is close to a road. If the approach angle is not severely constrained then anything moving could cause a false alarm.

I had hoped they were using camera movement technology to mitigate against false triggers. Possibly they are - as long as the PIR switches on the power first? Or is it always powered up and the heat sensing is a guard against cold objects like branches from triggering camera motion sensing.

Presumably if the bell has a low voltage supply then the unit will use it to charge a battery in case of power failures?

If they become popular then "two screws" are unlikely to prevent them being quickly stolen. Would that then reveal the house's wifi password? Like all IoT devices - how secure is it?

Do you want visitors to press your Ring?

Two small screws.....

So let me get this straight -- you're going to take a $200 device and attach it to your front door with "two small screws".

There's obviously some difference between living in a nice part of Santa Monica and, say, inner-city Manchester.

The real solution..

Rig your doorbell to give would be punters a slight jolt of electricity. No more people ringing your doorbell. They'll be sure to call ahead.

Of course in this day and age they might sue you for pain and suffering. -_-

On to plan two - Automated paintball turrets... nothing can go wrong...

device owner gives 4 out of 10

So I bought one of these and by the time you factor in VAT and customs fees it works out at pretty nearly £200. Not cheap. And for that you get a nice looking bit of hardware that attaches to a 20p plastic backplate that's screwed onto the wall with 4 screws. The screws are a decent length and won't come out in a hurry but the backplate looks like it'll just tear off round them. The bell then fits onto the backplate with 4 tiny little plastic lugs that a child could rip off. In addition their special 'security' screws are standard size 5 torx fittings so really would only deter a passing thief who couldn't be bothered to go home and get his torx set out. Oh, and every time you screw those torx screws in, they eat a bit more of the bottom two plastic lugs on the flimsy backplate.

As for the device itself: it can't handle being set up on one wireless network while being configured from a device on another! It just bombs out and leaves the device half setup. And to reset it and set it up again, you have to remove it from the wall so that you can press the setup button on the back. Same goes for recharging the battery, device has to be removed from the flakey looking backplate which looks like it'll only stand a few removal/install cycles before it gives up the ghost entirely. Then there's the device functionality itself...

The videos it takes are full of blocking and static, the audio in both directions is appalling and barely recognisable, motion detection eats 12% of the battery per day so the claimed one year battery lifetime is really a week unless you disable the motion detection. Which is probably a good thing anyway since it goes off about every 30 seconds even with the range setting set to 5 feet.

Then when someone does come to call and rings the bell, it takes a few seconds to come through to my phone but uses the standard android notification sound, there's no ability to choose a different one nor to set its volume individually. So it bongs quietly and half the time I don't hear it and the rest of the time, by the time I've swiped my phone screen to get the unlock screen and entered my pass code then pulled down the notification area from the top and selected the ring app and hit 'accept' 5 times because it doesn't detect when you click on it, the caller has given up and gone away.

The latest android app update has now added a big advert at the bottom of the screen for their cloud storage solution. This takes up about 20% of my phone screen and cannot be removed except by signing up for cloud storage. Thanks but no thanks. No bug fixes in this upgrade, just 20% less useful information.

Can you tell how impressed I am with this? Great idea ruined.

Missed the market target

Most people have a door bell and only want to enhance there existing door bell systems. It should optionally connect to the existing existing door bell wires and be powered from it, and if configured to do so, ring the existing door bell chime by shorting the wires with an internal relay. This would give people more options than replacing there existing door bells. The wireless door chimes are still a good idea for remote parts of the house.