11/16/2023 0 Comments Battery buddy reviewThis new invention has required many years of research and no less than 7 differents prototypes. Air Buddy’s primary objective is to make accessible the beauties of the underwater world to as many people as possible.Ĭreated by inventor-engineer Jan Kadlec and his team of diving enthusiasts, Airbuddy is a portable compressor fixed on the surface to a buoy that allows to dive 45 minutes to a maximum depth of 12 meters. Given Bird Buddy's sophisticated marketing and premium, designerly packaging, it's also clear a lot of the sticker price is going to pay for things that don't make the product itself any better.Airbuddy is a revolutionary product for freedivers, snorklers ane scuba divers. You have the option to up both the recording sensitivity and the resolution, but only if you pay for a Bird Buddy Pro subscription. The camera regularly fails to record birds that don't stick around long enough, the companion app still needs some polish, and by default, the hardware isn't being used to its full potential: the 5MP image sensor only records 720p video. For less plugged-in users, it could be a great smart home on-ramp.Īt the same time, though, it's frustrating in ways a $249 product shouldn't be. Bird Buddy's very cutesy hardware and app add a lot to the experience, too. Getting an up-close view of the birds that visit your home is a genuinely delightful experience not many gadgets can deliver, and it's refreshing that essential features like species identification and cloud video storage don't require a monthly fee. Everybody I've spoken to about it has been as enamored as I am, and a couple of people have even gone on to buy one based on my impressions - before this review was even initially published. The Bird Buddy smart bird feeder is so extremely charming, it's hard not to like. But a free software update has since enabled audio recording - and it's thankfully not a paid feature like full-res video is. At launch, video was recorded without audio, despite the camera having a built-in microphone. There's no night vision or HDR, but considering birds typically feed during daylight hours, that's not much of a drawback here. The camera's focus is fixed on the feeder's tray, and footage of critters feeding is typically clear enough to see fine details in plumage (or fur). That all feels a little slimy to me.Įven at 720p, though, videos are plenty crisp enough to see the action. Bird Buddy initially said that the 720p resolution cap that applies by default was in the name of battery savings, but 1080p video is now positioned as a perk of paying for a Bird Buddy Pro subscription. It reminds me a lot of the Pokémon series's Pokédex - there are even unique written descriptions for each species, and the option to play recordings of the sounds they make.īird Buddy's camera uses a vertically oriented five-megapixel sensor with a 120-degree field of view that provides a good view of what's happening both in the feed tray and out in front of the feeder. Tapping one lets you see all the photos and videos you've recorded of that given species, plus other info like typical size and weight, where you can find that particular bird worldwide, and some fun facts (did you know that house sparrows mate for life?). The Collection tab shows cards for each species your feeder has seen to date. For the $200+ this thing costs, I shouldn't have to manually edit clips to remove long stretches of inactivity before sharing. Considering Bird Buddy's got the machine-learning chops to visually identify scores of species of birds, video highlights seem trivial in comparison, and this feels like a big missed opportunity to me. So, you'll spend a lot of time scrubbing through to manually find highlights (or even more time watching an empty bird feeder and waiting). Annoyingly, the in-app player doesn't highlight sections of the video where there's activity in any way. The videos Bird Buddy records are one to two minutes long, but often only show birds for a few seconds of that runtime.
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