REVIEW – Leaving a dog home alone all day comes with a specific kind of guilt, and the Furbo Dog Camera is built to chip away at it. At $249 it costs more than most comparable remote feeders, but it earns some of that premium back with bark detection, night vision, and a design that actually looks like something you’d want sitting out in your living room instead of hidden in a closet.
Unboxing
The box itself is nicely designed, which tracks, since Furbo’s designers clearly put real thought into the product’s overall look.
That attention to detail carries through to the shipping packaging too.
What You Get
- Furbo Dog Camera
- Micro USB power cable
- Furbo power adapter
- Quick start guide
Power comes from an included Micro-USB cable and adapter.
The Furbo’s only port, Micro-USB for power, sits on the back of the unit.
Setting It Up
Setup is straightforward. Download the Furbo app, create an account, plug in the unit, and wait for it to boot. A colored LED on the front tells you what’s happening: white while starting up, blue when in use, purple with no WiFi connection, yellow in standby, and green once it’s ready to pair.
Once it’s on your WiFi, the app walks you through getting your dog acclimated to the unit and how to run it, and the next order of business is loading it up with treats.
Filling it means popping off the lid, and the bamboo Furbo uses for that lid is a genuinely nice design flourish. More importantly, a rubber seal underneath keeps the treats fresh.
Setup went flawlessly right up to this point. Furbo is specific about treat size, recommending “round shaped treats with a diameter around 0.4 inches.” I started with small training treats my dog Addy loves, breaking them up a bit more to be safe.
A hard-to-miss “max fill” line inside keeps you from overloading it. Capacity isn’t huge, room for roughly 20 to 30 pieces of kibble.
A small plunger inside pops up and knocks a few treats at a time out through the dispenser hole on the front.
The Jam
My first test dispense went fine. The second jammed almost immediately. I’d read other reviews mention jamming, but I didn’t expect it this fast.
The jam turned out worse than it first looked, and while I was working the stuck treat loose, a piece of the internal plunger popped free entirely.
About thirty minutes later, with Addy watching my every move like her next meal depended on it, I had the jammed treat out and everything reassembled correctly.
From there I played it safer and switched to Addy’s regular kibble, which she already loves and which fits Furbo’s size guidance. Dispensing went well after that, aside from a couple of small, easy-to-clear jams.
You can set the Furbo up anywhere in your living space, and the 3M double-sided tape on the bottom helps keep it upright against a determined, treat-motivated dog.
Camera, Mic, and Speaker
The camera does its job for keeping tabs on your pet and confirming treats land where they should, though the video quality is nothing special. It’s 720p with a 120-degree wide-angle lens and automatic night vision. A built-in mic and speaker let you talk to your dog, and like the camera, the audio quality is passable rather than impressive.
A short sound plays before each treat drops, prepping your dog for what’s coming. You can even record a custom sound. There’s also a bark-detection mode that pings your phone when the mic picks up barking, meant to help you check in or calm your dog down. I never got much use out of it. Even after tuning the sensitivity, it kept tripping on ordinary Brooklyn street noise.
The app can capture stills and video while it’s open, but there’s no cloud storage or timeline playback the way you’d get from something like a DropCam.
Live view only works while the app is open, no web version, and every treat dispense has to happen through the app itself.
The screenshots and clips are fine for sharing on social media. That’s about the ceiling for image quality here.
Living With It
The app itself is solid, if a bit cartoonish for my taste. Tapping the treat icon triggers a dispense, and since my treats were small, three or four usually came out at once. Addy never once complained about the overage. Icons for settings, switching between stills and video, and toggling the mic are all clearly laid out.
Once Addy caught on that the little white thing on the console was a treat source, she started spending a lot of time just staring at it, willing it into action. That’s more a testament to her patience than anything Furbo did wrong.
Overall I liked the Furbo and found it a genuinely fun way to check in on my dog during the workday. There are rough edges on the tech side, especially at a $249 price point, but if you’re willing to pay for it and careful about the treats you feed it, the Furbo delivers on the fun it promises.
By the Numbers
- Size: 5.91×4.72×8.86 inches (15x12x22.5cm)
- Weight: 1.76 pounds (800g)
- Camera: 720p HD, 120° wide-angle lens, 4x digital zoom, automatic night vision
- Audio: Built-in speaker, high-quality microphone
- Treat capacity: 30 pieces Recommend round shaped treats with a diameter around 0.4 inches; (1cm).
- Power: 100-240V, 5V2A
- Connectivity: 2.4GHz Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
If you’re comparing options in this category, see The Best Home Security Cameras I’ve Tested for how this one stacks up against the others I’ve tested.
Source: The sample for this review was provided by Furbo. Please visit their website.
