Qubo Smart Cam 360 Review Bytes

The cameraThe Micro-USB cableWarranty paper

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This spherical shape Qubo camera is cuter than the oblong one I had reviewed previously. There is the moving camera which is the black portion and it is housed in a white case or shell. Now although it is called a 360 camera, it doesn’t cover the entire 360-degree field of view. It has some blind spots, but I reckon from the corner of a room (where it’s most likely to be fixed/placed), its tilt and pan movement should cover a broad view. Also, in the black area, at the bottom of the camera lies a microphone and a micro-SD card slot (for offline storage of up to 256GB). You can manually move the black sphere in order to find this slit. Now this motorized component is fixed on a frustum. The Qubo branding is present on the front and beneath it lies an LED indicant of its activity state. The green color denotes it’s on and active while Red means it’s on but not active. For it to be on, you must plug it into a power source using the bundled microSD to USB-A cable. The use of a dated interface like this is a bit off-putting. But since we would mostly connect it and leave it, I can give this choice a pass. Anyhoo, it inserts into the back of the frustum wherein you’d also find the machine’s power switch. This button isn’t very clicky. Next up, let’s talk about — Well, it is simple. You seat it somewhere plugged into an electrical socket. The rest of the setup takes place through the Qubo app. Open the app and go to Devices, then click on the hamburger icon, followed by Add Device. Choose either the device type (Cam 360 in this case) or press on the plus sign. It would scan and show the device in range that is ready to pair. Ensure your phone is in a 2.4GHz WiFi network since 5Hz won’t work. A bit weird weakness. Nevertheless if so far things are done right, you should be able to tether both devices. I was offered the promotional Gold subscription plan free for a month as a trial period within which I did all my testing. You might also get this trial period. The prime benefit of it is that you can store the data in the cloud which was convenient for my review. But if you want to store the data in a memory card, insert that in the slot. It goes without saying that you must position the Cam 360 within the WiFi range. By the by, the Qubo app is downloadable from Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The app will guide you on how to set it up and use it. One more thing is that you will have to register an account with Qubo by filling in some basic stuff like your mobile number and email ID. During the setup process, you will be suggested to enable Alexa. Well, that or Google Assistant can work with it. That is you get to watch the recordings on a bigger screen. More on the app and the subscription plans in the coming section. So, Qubo Smart Cam 360 is compatible with smart assistants and smart displays. There are several such cool features in its arsenal. Let’s know them one by one. The most important thing is the video quality. This can be set to High (Full HD) or Low (SD). Even during the night, you could go with either color or infrared capture, wherein the latter shoots in better perceivable but black & white mode. Now as mentioned already, these recordings are done in an almost 360-degree pan and tilt. This feed can be accessed through your phone. It can be a continuous 24×7 log (only with an SD card); Live or otherwise; and based on when a person is found or motion is detected in the frame. If you don’t want you or your family members to be identified, you can train the machine to recognize your face. But, this process and face tagging thing weren’t working properly. You’d receive notifications for the same or you can also check out the timeline of events within the app. You can remotely keep tabs on what’s happening at the place where’s it’s installed. This real-time video can be streamed in a decent quality even if you watch it on mobile data. And if you want to notify or converse with someone in the vicinity of the camera, you can do that with help of the built-in microphone and speaker facility. Similarly, within the app, there is a slew of other useful features too like trigger alarms against intruders, creating and setting routines as well as applying various time and location-based modes. Last but not least, all the data collected, both online and local SD card storage, is claimed to be securely stored and encrypted. In case you are wondering, the cloud servers are in India only. So, is this Made in India Smart Cam 360 by Qubo worth your money? Qubo Smart Cam 360 covers all the bases of what’s expected from a product of this type. It allows a good monitoring experience with FHD quality, motion/person-activated recording, intruder alarm, smartphone alerts, etc. It offers both offline and online storage of the videos. And this data, especially the cloud one is claimed to be safely stored in local servers within the country and backed by standard encryption measures. Also, compared to a previous-gen product I had used, this one is better specced too. So, to the question of whether you should consider this camera for your home security, I’d say yes. But, I say so while bearing minor discontent towards things like the use of micro-USB cable, just 2.4GHz WiFi support, and the limitation of continuous recording working only on an SD card. I wish Qubo addresses these shortcomings in its future products.