The Withings Smart Baby Monitor is definitely the “Cadillac” of baby monitors. Withings packed an amazing number of ways to monitor and interact with your baby into a small, portable package. As the father of a 2 year old, I was excited to give these features a try. Would all the features offered by the Withings Smart Baby Monitor turn out to be truly useful or are parents better off settling for something a little less fancy at a cheaper price?
A Compact, Portable Monitor
Withings managed to make a baby monitor that doesn’t look out of place in a home full of Apple gadgets. The white, shiny, and curvy plastic look of the monitor reminds me of the old white unibody Macbook that Apple discontinued a couple of years ago. It certainly is a sleek looking baby monitor (as weird as it feels to say that).
As a parent, I have found that I often have to take our baby monitor on the road when visiting family or friends overnight. The Withings Smart Baby Monitor folds neatly up into a cube shape for easy portability. It even works off of battery power for ease of use almost anywhere – even if an outlet isn’t readily available. I have to say I really appreciated the thought put into the foldable design of this monitor.
Inside the box a clip is included that fastens the monitor to the baby’s crib, but it just as easily sits on a nearby nightstand or shelf as well. The included 6 foot cord made reaching a nearby outlet easy.
The video feed, all the monitor controls, and all the data collected from the baby’s room is visible via a free app available to download from iTunes for your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. (Added Note: Withings also recently released an Android app for those with Android devices).
Packed with Features
The number of features and interactions this monitor allows is truly staggering and could be the subject of a really long article. Instead of hitting on every feature, I thought it would be more beneficial for me to focus on some of the main features that I got a chance to try out and how useful I found each of these features as a parent.
Live Video Feed from Anywhere via the Internet
The Withings Smart Baby Monitor offers a video feed over the internet accessible via your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad via a username and password you set up when using your monitor for the first time. This video feed is truly available from anywhere in the world over Wi-Fi or cellular data. As a parent used to the old limited-range baby monitors, this took some getting used to. I am used to the idea that, if I head outside to grab the mail or do some yard work, the baby monitor feed drops once I wander too far from my house. It was truly neat to be able to access the feed from my daughter’s room from work or when I was out of town. (Don’t worry, I never left my daughter in the house unattended.)
While this was truly a neat feature, the times it was practical to have a limitless range baby monitor were almost none. It goes without saying that parents should not ever leave a baby alone in the house while they go any farther than their own yard. While it was fun to check in on my daughter napping while she was home with my wife and I was away at work, the novelty wore off quickly and I never felt like this was truly a needed feature to have in a baby monitor.
Infrared Night Vision
The built in camera offers a quite clear color video feed during the daylight hours, and switches over to night vision via infrared LED when light is low. While I was impressed with the daytime clarity of the camera, I found the night vision mode to be a bit blurry. When the camera was mounted on a nearby clothes closet, I had trouble seeing anything beyond indecipherable shapes in my daughter’s crib. If my daughter was really moving around I could tell, but if her movements were more subtle or if she was just lying still it was difficult to truly see anything clearly.
Day vision (on the left) and infrared night vision (on the right).
As the owner of another, much less fancy and non-internet-capable video baby monitor, the night vision of the Withings monitor was inferior to the night vision of my less expensive baby monitor. Both monitors were set up on the exact same clothes closet. Moving the Withings Smart Baby Monitor to closer range seemed to help for clarity, but hanging it on the side of my toddler’s crib was not an option as my daughter, being a typical grabby 2 year old, would easily pull it down. I guess this wouldn’t be as much of an issue for someone wanting to monitor a newborn or younger baby who is not old enough to grab things mounted on a crib yet.
Temperature and Humidity Sensors
Being in a house with no central air conditioning system, my wife and I are always worried about how warm or cold our daughter is at night. The Withings Smart Baby Monitor offers real time temperature and humidity tracking with customizable alerts to warn you if the baby’s room gets too humid, warm or cold. Unlike some of the other bells and whistles of this monitor that I found less than practical, I did find this feature to be truly handy. It was nice to see a temperature reading of my daughter’s room before we put her down to bed to know whether to turn up a fan or open a window. It also helped put me at ease to know she was comfortable rather than always having to wonder how hot it was in her room or second guess myself about how warmly we dressed her before bed.
These readings are constantly available right at the bottom of the video feed and iPhone alerts can be set up to go off and warn you if certain temperatures or humidity levels are reached.
Lullabies, Multi-Color Nightlight, and Voice Speaker
I grouped these three features together because I feel they all fit in the “sometimes neat, but not all that practical” category. The Withings monitor allows you to remotely activate, from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod, a lullaby to play from the speaker on the monitor at any time. I never once found a practical time to use this as my daughter typically falls asleep to the sound of the fan in her room. I don’t feel playing music would truly help to calm her or might even make it less likely she goes to sleep as she likely would be curious as to why a song is playing in her room. Again, maybe this is a feature that someone with a newborn could condition their baby to find relaxing or soothing if used from the get-go, but I did not find it very practical for a 2 year old.
The multi-colored night light built into the monitor is another feature I never truly found useful in day-to-day use. My daughter loved seeing the color changing light when I showed it to her, but I never once used it during the night or during her nap time to calm her. The app allows you to control both the brightness and color of the night light.
Finally the ability to speak into your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and have your voice remotely played over the monitor in your baby’s room is another neat idea that is not truly regularly useful. Maybe I am just an overcautious parent, but I do like to go into my daughter’s room if she is crying or upset to help me figure out what exactly is wrong. It just didn’t ever feel right to me to try to calm her by using my voice over the baby monitor.
One neat benefit this feature gives you is the ability to talk to your child even if you are away from home. I could see some parents wishing their child a good night while gone on a business trip or when they can’t be around for another reason. This feature, like all the other monitor features, works from anywhere in the world.
Not as Convenient as I Imagined
The idea of using your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad as your baby monitor sounds like a really neat idea but quickly runs into some snags. I found that accessing the video feed really seemed to drain the battery quickly on my iPhone. While you can just listen to the audio and have the app run in the background, this takes away access to most of the neat features the monitor offers in the first place. Having to always plug in my iPhone when monitoring my daughter, lest I run my iPhone battery way down, began to feel like a hassle after awhile.
Second, using your Apple device as a monitor really limits the usefulness of your Apple device. For example, while monitoring your sleeping child, taking calls interrupts your monitoring ability. Listening to music, watching videos, playing games, or doing anything else that requires sound is really out of the question as well if you want to be actively listening to or watching what is going on in your child’s room. Also, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, you feel the need to keep your device plugged in while using it as a monitor as monitoring seems to drain your battery rather quickly. This makes you need to have to hang around an outlet with your device.
I began to realize that I didn’t really enjoy using my iPhone as my monitoring device. After spending some time with the Withings Smart Baby Monitor, I was happy to go back to my old monitor so that my iPhone could be freed up to be used for other things while my daughter slept or napped.
Verdict
If you don’t mind spending a premium and like the idea of having a baby monitor that is accessible from anywhere in the world via your Apple devices, the Withings Smart Baby Monitor may be for you. It offers an astounding number of features – though some are much more practical than others.
For the vast majority of people, however, a simpler, short-range video baby monitor will be much more practical and less expensive. It may be the “Cadillac” of video baby monitors (at least as the number of features go), but not everyone needs, wants, or can afford a Cadillac. Unless you truly think you’ll find many of the bells and whistles offered on the Withings Smart Baby Monitor more useful than I did, you are better off skipping the Withings for a cheaper baby monitoring option.
Availability
The Withings Smart Baby Monitor is available right now on the Withings website for $249.95.
The Withings Smart Baby Monitor was provided for review on iSource by Withings through MaxBorgesAgency. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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