Possible origin of the name DropCam

You're liable to see a lot of advertisements for DropCam this year.  They won somebody's "Gadget of the Year" award which, of course, gives them bragging rights until they come out with something new or someone else's gadget beats this one.

I want to get into all the good features of this marvelous gadget but feel that the flaws are so important that I need to put them first.  Otherwise you could get so excited you stop in mid-review and miss the warning.

WARNING:  DropCam is an amateur security system - designed by, designed for, sold by, bought by, and mostly appreciated by amateurs.  Simply put, it suffers from the "dancing bear" syndrome.  You don't criticize how well a bear dances because you're so amazed he can dance at all.

Likewise DropCam is extremely easy to set up.  It is relatively inexpensive.  And it pretends to play with the big boys.   But it has a lot of growing up to do.  I've had the system in place for over a month and it should have settled down.  But I still get 1 to 3 false positives per hour and a complete signal drop with one or  the other of my two cameras.  A camera that cries "wolf" that frequently is soon a camera ignored and a camera ignored is no better than a camera never purchased.  It's a sad situation since it would be a great leap forward if it met expectations.  And it's sad because it looks like all the will and wherewithal was there.  For example, the camera triggers an alert if the sound or movement in the field of vision exceeds some threshold.  There's a sensitivity switch for the sound but nothing for the motion detection.  A waving flag, a moving shadow, almost anything at all triggers the motion alarm.  I keep hoping that there's some intelligent logic that will kick in and improve the alarm but it hasn't happened so far.'

Cutting out entirely seems to have something to do with the Wireless connection.  If you're close to the fringe of your wireless router's coverage, rather than drop into a lower definition transmit mode, the camera will just shut itself off.  Not an encouraging trick if you're depending on the camera to watch over valuable property or loved ones.  But it just may be the reason this is called DropCam.  It drops the signal better than any of its competitors.

The tracking software is straightforward but not powerful or easy to use.  And some of the best features, such as a timeline, are in the PC version but not the iPhone app.

I understand the audio feature (you can listen to and talk back to the surveiled object) is new on the latest cameras.  Don't count on it replacing a halfway decent baby monitor because it won't.  And they don't mention in their ads that the audio is half-duplex making you feel like a trucker with a push-to-talk CB.

Let me end on a positive note.  The camera  is quick and easy to install.  I had it running within 5 minutes and monitoring our front hallway within 10 minutes.  That's because I walk slowly.  Otherwise, those times would be half that.

So if you're an amateur looking for an amateur system this is a good one.  But professionals should keep looking.