Piece of Crap - useless as a doorbell, useless as a security camera
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2024 | Rating: 1/5 | Best Sellers in Amazon Devices & Accessories
id give it zero stars if that were an optionsystem is way too slow  by the time a video loads whoever was at your door is long gonedoor bell does not ring inside the house unless its hard wired to a preexisting chime  what good is a doorbell that doesnt ring inside the houseactivity recording at your door is hit or miss  sometimes it gets recorded  sometimes not  ive often opened my door to discover that a package has been delivered but no alert from blink and no recordingdoorbell eats expensive lithium batteries  two year claimed battery life is just an outright lie  two months is more like it  i just had to install the third set of batteries in the 5 months ive owned the thing  new energizer aas read 18 volts  when the system tells you that you need to replace the batteries they still read 15 volts so i suppose i could reuse them in another devicesystem went off line after 5 months and is now no longer recording activity at the door  im getting alerts on my phone but when i open the app it says no recent activity and nothing has been recorded  even when it was working the videos are so slow to load that you get recordings of what happened  not whats happening in real timethe system is also triggered by events far outside the activity zone  i got lots of videos of cars passing by in the street  way outside of the activity zone  this of course helps to drain the batteriesdont waste your money  buy something elseupdateafter posting my initial review i was contacted by kevin from blink customer service  kevin requested permission to review my system logs  which i granted  after reviewing the logs kevin said that my doorbell appeared to be defective and sent me a replacementi installed the replacement doorbell and saw some slight improvement  in that i was seeing less false alarms from cars driving bythe latency which is apparently built into the system makes it pretty much useless as a doorbell or as a security devicenotifications are still hit or missa few anecdotal examples  the other day i had two events scheduled  someone from my lawyers office was coming by with some papers for me to sign i was also expecting someone to come by to test the fire alarms  the fire alarm people had given themselves a 830 am to 400 pm window to show up  so i was periodically opening my front door to see if they were in the area  on one occasion i opened the door to find a young lady from the law office standing on my stoop  she had pressed the doorbell but blink told me nothing  if i hadnt been checking for the fire alarm people i would have missed her  later i heard someone banging on my door and opened it to find the fire alarm people had arrivedreviewing the recordings later i found that the young lady from the law office had walked up and rung the doorbell  there was a video and audio recording of her ringing the bell  blink however told me nothingthe fire alarm guy had also rung the doorbell and when he got no response pounded on the door  video and audio recording shows him ringing the doorbell  all i heard was the pounding on the door  in both instances because of the latency in the system the notification on my phone must have come after i had already answered the dooranother time i heard someone pounding on the door  when i opened the door i found that the mailman had walked up to my door dropped off a package and pounded on the door  no notification from blink and no recording  no nothinga few days later the new doorbell went offline again  troubleshooting guide said to remove the batteries wait a while and then reinstall them  no effect so i pulled the batteries again and checked the voltage with a multimeter  one battery read 15v and the other read 145v so i replaced the both  blink did not give me a low battery warning  just went offline  ive had the blink doorbell for 9 months  this is now the fifth time ive had to replace the batteries  so the new doorbell is eating batteries just as fast as the original defective doorbell was  two months max  to reiterate the two year battery life claim is just a flat out liehurrah the doorbell was working again  unfortunately i was again getting notifications but no recordings  just the no recent activity response againafter futzing around with it for a couple of days to no effect i though maybe id try unplugging the sync unit and then plugging it back in  after plugging it back in the sync paired with the doorbell and i am once again getting recordings of whoever was as in the past tense at my door  nothing you are able to view in real timebought a fire hd thinking that would work with the blink to allow me hear the doorbell and view whoever was at the door but the fire hd shuts itself off after a few minutes of inactivity so that was again useless  finally bought an echo dot and now get a someone is at your front door alert when someone presses the doorbell  so ive spent another 15000 just to try to get the damned thing to ring inside the house  again however  there is so much latency built into the system that whoever was at your door is likely to be long gone before you can pull up a video to see who is was there  so ive had to buy two additional components just to try to get the fing doorbell to ring inside the house  which by definition is what a doorbell is supposed to doto say i am extremely pisssedoff with the blink doorbell is a gross understatement  the advertising copy implying that you will be able to have a video and audio conversation with the smiling people at you door is just flat out fraud