After a year hiatus, smart lock maker August is back with arguably its most consumer-friendly product yet: the August View.
The wireless smart doorbell features a three- to six-month battery life, a 1440p camera, motion alerts, two-way communication, cloud storage options and multiple faceplates to help match your outside decor.
The August View will be available starting on March 28 for $230 (around £175, AU$325), which will make it August’s most expensive doorbell and puts it around the same price as its main competitor, the Ring 2.
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If you’ve seen August’s previous doorbells, the View will seem like a substantial change for the company whose previous smart locks were bulky, square and wired.
The new slim design will allow it to fit on the front of more homes, and the change to a more traditional doorbell design instead of a weird oversized pad seems like a smart move all things considered. That's on top of the switch to a wireless model that will enable folks in apartments without wiring to own a doorbell.
The downside to August’s upcoming product, as The Verge rightfully points out, is that you’ll only be able to watch five-second clips of cloud footage after the camera records movement without subscribing to a protection package.
You’ll get notifications every time the camera detects movement, and you can always directly access the camera via a live feed, but clips are only stored for 24 hours and viewable in five-second increments right out of the box.
The silver lining is that August is still platform agnostic and will work with both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa once the View is available in March. (Sorry, Apple users: no HomeKit support just yet.)
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