AqaraVideo Doorbell G4 with Chime, 1080p FHD HomeKit Secure Video Doorbell Camera, 2-Way Audio, Night Vision, Local Face Recognition, Automations, Wireless or Wired, Supports Apple Home, Alexa,Google

I've seen the scathing review left by someone who has owned it for a whole 5 weeks on battery presumably without devices in the Apple ecosystem that make sense for this purchase, like HomePods etc for chimes. so I thought it would be good to give some feedback as someone who knows what they are doing and has owned the device for 18 months and is well invested in the Apple ecosystem and my home network.To counter their points -- If you can't see who is who with this doorbell in day or night mode then you need a bigger screen to view it on or a trip to specsavers, sorry. Looks great on my 4K Apple TV.- Why you would want to use the manufacturers cloud features and HomeKit is beyond me, but yes you won't find any of Aqara's propriety cloud based AI on HomeKit directly. HomeKit itself supports various video detections and 7 day recording with an iCloud plan. Nothing stops you using both at the same time and you can record to the SD card to keep it local as a backup regardless, them claiming you can't is again user error.- The alarm function works perfectly. If you try and remove the device without disabling it, then it will go off. That's user error if you don't disable it prior, even if you think you did you obviously didn't.- The device has survived the UK rain on my uncovered porch for 18 months. What isn't waterproof? Oh wait, they are talking about the video based motion going off during rain. Yes, this happens with any video camera that uses video rather than an actual motion sensor. If you've set it up for alerts on any motion rather than people/packages/animals you are going to have a bad time with notifications. This isn't specific to this doorbell.- The batteries will die fast using 24/7 HKSV recording especially when you've set it up to record the motion of rain. It's a no brainer. Hardwire it in if you're doing 24/7 cloud based recording. Battery power is fine for the SD card recording setup with a bit of care into what you want it to do rather than recording rain and also battery will be massively affected by the below...- The chime has to have good wifi and be close to your doorbell to operate correctly. Using a router provided by BT over the other side of your house with the chime no where near the doorbell will give you a bad time. The manual is very clear on ideal conditions, but some people refuse to invest in their own network infrastructure. It will also cause more battery drain.- 720p stream is there for low quality connections so you can still view it rather than seeing nothing. If you're constantly seeing 720p stream remotely you need to look at your local networks upload and your current connections speed and wifi quality. I have never seen the 720p mode, so again points to the setup of device/local network being a huge problem for the reviewer!

I am an Apple Home user, and I love how it seamlessly integrates with my smart home ecosystem. I already have some Aqara products, so it's a brand that I know and trust already. I'm so glad that they came out with a smart doorbell. Great viewing angle and build quality.

Don't waste your time.We bought this after a really bad experience with a Netatmo doorbell, hoping that this would solve our issues and finally give us a reliable, easy to use and Apple HomeKit enabled doorbell. Unfortunately, all we ended up with was a non-responsive paperweight, after informing Aqara of our issues, they couldn't provide a diagnosis or root-cause, however, they did send a replacement unit without us needing to go through the hassle of returning the defunct unit. On one hand, this was great - on the other hand, if you had a faulty product wouldn't you want to have it back so you can understand what went wrong? Or are they shipping units knowing there's a likely fault that will occur at some stage anyway? Needless to say, we were sent another, new unit; within a matter of weeks, the new doorbell became a worthless, unresponsive paperweight again, and after requesting a refund, we finally received one.Credit to AQARA, their responsiveness, customer service and speed of resolution was good all the way through (I couldn't say the same for Netatmo) but unfortunately there was/is evidently something fundamentally wrong with their product for the same thing to occur where the doorbell refused to connect, show a video feed, or even appear to turn on. We used the doorbell as a wired-in unit, so our issue was not battery life related.We've since gone for a Eufy video doorbell which has been faultless so far. I'd avoid Aqara based on our experience - and opt for something else. Its an expensive paperweight.

Upsides: works even slightly farther than 5-10 metres away (video/audio quality suffers though, so bear that in mind), works with Apple Home Kit, decent quality picture, detects faces very well.Downsides: batteries don't last long, requires their own app to set up and use full functionality: a dirty move.

All things considered pretty good. The video quality is good, easy to setup. Lots of mounting options to get a good angle. It can be battery powered or wired in which is brilliant. The batteries go quite quickly but I do have it doing a lot of the features so I could reduce that to keep it simple and have longer life on battery. With HomeKit it works great with Apple, the video auto pops up on my Apple TV when it goes off and it knows who in my family is there via face recognition and that works very well. It’s fun to be able to have any mp3 sound for the chime (and you can get the button to playback a sound as well that can be different from the chime, I setup mine to have R2D2 sound)Overall does the job great for me.