Today your front door is much more than just an entrance to your homes. It is also the place where packages are delivered and at times where unexpected people come to ask for donations, your signature to support a political candidate, or just a few minutes of your time to sign a petition. The ability to know you just received a delivery or someone is at your front has become critical since we now have porch bandits stealing our packages and other, perhaps, unwelcomed callers that you might want to say “Sorry I can’t come to the door now” without going to your door. With the Nooie Cam Doorbell you can say sorry not interesting from inside your home or thousands of miles from your home. Nooie Cam Doorbell serves as a sentry ready to inform you if it spots a person within a certain number of feet from your front door. It is used with an app that you download from the Apple or Google Play stores. This app lets you set Nooie’s PIR motion senor’s sensitivity to 3, 10, or 20 feet, engage a detection zone, and also set the unit so it filters out non-human alerts. During testing with all of these features turned on, all notifications that I received during testing were created by people coming to or exiting through my front door. Nooie, of course, is also a doorbell that lets you set the ringer volume and the sound that the chimes will play when a person presses the bell. The Cam Doorbell performs all the tasks listed above and it is powered by a very large 10,000 mAh rechargeable internal battery that the company indicated could last up to 6 months before it needs to be recharged. The very large battery does create a large foot print. The unit you attach outside next to your door is 6 ¼ inches high, 2 ¼ inches wide and 1 ¾ inches thick. The second part of the system is its base station that communicates with the doorbell over your home’s WiFi. The base station has a very loud chime and a micro SD card slot for local recording. If you intend to do local recording you do have to supply your own SD card. Your other choice is to select cloud recording for a monthly nominal fee. After you download the app you just need to plug this base station into a standard electrical outlet and then follow the directions in the app to get the unit connected to the WiFi in your home. Since the base station communicates using your 2.4G or 5G WiFi bands it can be placed anywhere in your home that has a decent WiFi signal. Using the Nooie app you can hold conversations with the person at your door while you are home or away from home.
Reasons to Drool The camera on the Nooie doorbell has day and night vision, transmits HD video and it had zero false notifications during testing. The base station can be network cabled or wirelessly connected to your WiFi home router. The base station has a very loud chime which can help people who are hard of hearing be aware that someone is at their door without even accessing the app. Since the base station can be plugged in anywhere in your home it can easily be moved to make it easy for elderly members of the family to hear the doorbell even if they don’t own a smartphone and you could use the app to monitor their front door for them. The Nooie app has a sharing component which allows you to name others that you want to receive the same app notifications as you.
Not So Cool My testing was performed using the app on an iPhone and also an Android phone. On the iPhone the person who rang the doorbell could hear me and I could hear them. There was some latency between the doorbell press or or motion sensor detection and the receipt of the event notification on the iPhone and the transmission of voices. On the Samsung smartphone there was major latency for both types of notifications and the person who rang the doorbell could only hear me after a high degree of latency. I however could not hear what my wife was saying until she spoke to me in a very loud voice through the open house door. Not being able to hear the person at your front door when they are telling you why they are there is a significant problem and I am therefore only recommending this product for use with an iPhone.
Video Test A video is worth a thousand words. The short recording shows a security camera recording, a zoomed image from that video and the Nooie doorbell app in use with an iPhone and android phone.
