D-Link has a new security camera. But it doesn’t look like a security camera. In fact, it looks like something out of Oblivion or Horizon Zero Dawn — it’s a sleek metal cylinder, with a 180-degree wide-angle lens and night vision and the ability to hook up to your Apple gadgets wirelessly.
The $329.95 Omna 180 CAM HD records video in 1080p to a microSD card (up to 128GB in size) in the cylindrical camera’s base, but it’s also the first Apple HomeKit-enabled camera that you can buy — and if you’ve got an iPhone or iPad or Apple TV, that should interest you very much.
Apple’s Home app makes the Omna ridiculously easy to set up — just power it on, use your phone to scan the HomeKit accessory code in the camera’s box, and it’ll instantly be connected to your home’s Wi-Fi. From there, you can check in on whatever the camera’s seeing just by opening up the Home app, and you’ll also get push notifications on your phone or tablet’s lock screen whenever the Omna detects motion. When you’re away from home, the video streaming to your device will be dynamically adjusted to give you the best possible picture based on your home internet upload speed.
The Omna doesn’t store any footage in the cloud: it’s all local, but you can play it back on your smartphone wherever you are and whenever you want to. The Omna also has a built-in speaker and microphone, so you can have a two-way chat with someone at your doorstep — or an intruder inside your house. With night vision recording (up to 5 metres distance, apparently) and motion detection with automatic recording, it seems like a pretty comprehensive one-piece security system — as long as the thief doesn’t, y’know, steal it as well.
If you want to control the Omna 180 while you’re not around, you’ll need a fourth-gen Apple TV in your house, or an iPad on the local Wi-Fi network. That’s the big appeal of Apple Home: as well as being simple to set up, you only need to have an Apple TV — which, if you’re heavily bought into the Apple ecosystem already, you might even have hooked up to your TV in the first place — to check in on everything remotely.
We’ll have a review of the Omna coming up soon, so stay tuned! [D-Link]
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