Designed to work without a dedicated PC, the new Astak Mole was announced today. The Mole is a wireless webcam that can upload video directly to such sites as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. It can also record directly to an SD card in the camera.
I’m curious however, exactly who will be using this product, and for what. It can be controlled remotely (even pan and tilt) via a web interface, has 15 LEDs for night time recording, and a two way microphone so the person being filmed can have a conversation with the viewer. The internet feed to the camera comes via either an ethernet port, or an internal wifi card. Recording quality is pretty standard, with the high quality mode set at 640×480. The camera can also be set to a motion sensitivity mode, and capture movement as it happens, and record it for later.
The obvious usage is for home or small business security, this sounds like something that Biggs would be into given his quest for a home monitoring solution. The website suggests that it would also make a good baby monitor, which certainly sounds reasonable.
The Mole cam will ship early this November for $299.
[via Electronista]
Seems a little pricey, though obviously feature packed. I don’t know who is going to buy one for “social networking” except porn stars and complete egoists.
Their specs page is wrong I do believe. From the images and other material it says it’s WiFi, but from the specs there’s no mention of 802.11(of any sorts) and only talks Ethernet.
“What is the Mole?” conversely states that it’s WiFi enabled. But the 3 step setup guide doesn’t say anything about it (I suppose it would be >3 then).
For the money you can buy better IP cameras. It takes some digging, but this is another overpriced “pretty” camera with bismal specs (I’ll never buy a camera from a manufacturer that doesn’t put lux levels in the specs – especially one that touts ifrared LED for “night vision”).
The camera supports 802.11, I don’t know why it is not on the specification page, but it does say wifi on the features page. WIFI setup is more than 3 steps because there is no way to setup the WIFI security keys without first plugging it in to
Ethernet first.
See http://tweetree.com/yoicscam for an example video feed generated with the
YouTube and Twitter software embedded in the camera.
One thing not mentioned is that it supports uploading video to YouTube as a private video that only the YouTube account holder can see. So you can use it for remote storage of security video as well as store it locally on the camera.
As for video, maybe one of the reviewers will do a review of the “night vision” and daylight performance as the video quality is outstanding compared to most IP cameras I’ve seen. It has a true mechanical IR cutout filter so it doesn’t mess up the daylight video.
And lastly it is one of the few cameras that actually works with the Apple MAC and
the iPhone.
You can get wireless IP cameras on ebay right now for $75. Many also looks almost exactly the same as this $299 model.
I have one on the way for home security. Add the free software that emails you a photo when the camera picks up motion and you are all set.
I’m kind of Leary of all these IP cameras, I bought one that looks sort of like this off of ebay.
Biggest POS I’ve ever seen, only worked on IE and the active-X crashes my machine. Not real streaming video just jerky frame updates and bad sound. Gets real hot also. Night vision was a joke.