iBaby Monitor Review - Big Brother is Watching ...my dog

I just bought a new video baby-monitor, which is a little weird, because my wife and I don't have any kids. It is unoriginally named iBaby Monitor. I think the lower-case "i" that gets attached to every new device to hit the market is getting a little tired.

I picked up the camera because I wanted to watch my dog while I am at work. My dog, Holly, is cute but she has a tendency to get a little devious when nobody is around. Whatever she decides to eat, shred, or otherwise destroy, seems to end up in the middle of the living room floor. [mental note: Give Holly some pats for making it so easy to decide which room to put the camera in]

I had some real trouble getting the camera hooked up (more on that later) but once I got it working it was awesome. The cam has some great features:

• The cam can rotate almost 360, and tilt up and down completely silently
• It has infrared night vision
• Can be viewed and controlled from my iPhone, iPad, or any computer.
• Works on both wifi or 3G
• Built in microphone to hear what's going on

There are lots of similar cameras out there. But the reason I chose this one is because it is the only camera I have seen that has two way communication. There is little point in me watching my dog tear up my mail if I can't do anything about it. With the iBaby I can yell her through my Bose speakers.

Although I am completely satisfied and happy with my new purchase there are a few drawbacks that I should mention:

1. Most importantly, as I mentioned before its not that easy to configure. In fact I actually purchased this cam twice. The first time I couldn't get it to work properly outside my home network, got frustrated, and took it back to the store the next day. The broken English in the manual is very hard to understand. I am pretty sure the Chinese guy that wrote the instructions took english lessons from a Korean guy.  I ended up emailing customer service.  The woman, Vanessa, that responded was incredibly helpful and provided detailed instructions.  I went out and bought the camera a second time, followed my new instructions and it worked perfectly.
2. It is a little disappointing that the software doesn't have an option to record. I have used several other cameras in the past that can easily be set up to record when they sense motion. I hope that this can be remedied in a future update.
3. My third item is not so much a complaint about the product as it is about its marketing. I think that the developers are extremely short sighted to market this strictly as a baby monitor. There are plenty of uses for it that have nothing to do with babies:

• Obviously it could be marketed as a remote security camera.
• I read online that one guy wanted to keep an eye on his elderly father.
• Someone else wanted to monitor their new puppy.