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Hey, I'm C/Net's Ry Crist, here with the first take of canary, this is the all in one security device that did very well on Indiegogo back in the summer of 2013.
And now in January of 2015, its finally shipping out to backers, including the two units you see here, that we got at C/Net Appliances HQ.
Now, Canary can be armed, it can be disarmed, you can put it in privacy mode, that turns off the camera and the microphone.
It also has temperature and humidity sensors and air quality sensors that will watch for the general conditions around the home.
It doesn't have any sort of home automation capabilities, though.
It doesn't have a z-wave radio or a ZigBee radio.
It can't communicate with third party devices like smart locks and smart lights and integrate them into your system the way that a device like Piper can.
And that's kind of a shortcoming, in my opinion.
I think that.
Smart lighting especially is a really good thing to add to a smart security kit.
You have someone try to get in at night or the motion sensor picking something up, you want a light to come on.
That's a really good deterrent.
You can't do that with Canary, at least not yet.
Also, you have to update your Canary with the latest firmware as you set it up with your system and that was a real tough process.
We had to do that.
Several times over the course of about two days, before he finally got it updated and up to speed and able to work.
Once it was, I tried it out in my apartment, and the general functionality of the system worked, but the camera feed was not really viewable.
You could watch about 30 seconds of black, and then maybe 2 seconds of live video, and then back to black.
It was a bit of a pain.
It wasn't until we brought it back to work and tried it again here at the office that we got that live video feed up and running.
Now, one last complaint that I have about Canary's setup in it's current state is that it doesn't let you set it to automatically trigger the siren.
So, right now it's in armed mode.
That's this green light at the bottom.
That means that it should send me an alert whenever it detects motion, it should.
Give me the option to call the police if I need to.
But it won't do any of that itself.
It won't even sound the siren on its own.
So if someone's breaking in in the middle of the night I'll get a notification on my phone saying there's activity.
But that siren won't do off.
Canary says that they're gonna change that, they're gonna add a feature for auto siren mode.
But that's not ready right now.
Now Canary is currently shipping out to backers and preorders from last year, and should arrive in retail outlets like Best Buy and Target by this spring.
And at that point, those new features should be baked in, and the system should be a little better developed.
The Android app should also be out.
So at that time, before it goes live to retail, we're gonna have a full review up, but for now we're gonna give it a few more weeks at least to see how it develops.
Thanks for watching.
Be sure and check out the rest of my smart home coverage at at cnet.com.
For CNET Appliances, I'm [INAUDIBLE].
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