There’s nothing more comforting as a parent than being able to monitor your newborn while they sleep for those first few weeks or months. While an audio monitor is good, a video monitor can even be better. If you have kids or are expecting, you know there are tons of choices and the monitors can be quite expensive.
But if you’re like me, you likely have a couple of iOS devices lying around. So for only a couple for dollars you can have a full video/audio baby monitor. The app you need is Best Baby Monitor. It’s in the App Store for $3.99 or $4.99 on the Mac App Store.
A quick note, you’ll need an iOS device with a camera, and preferably one with a flash. Developer Martin Man suggests you use an iPhone 3GS or newer, an iPod Touch 3rd generation or newer or an original iPad or newer.
Best Baby Monitor is so simple to use. Connect your two devices over your home WiFi network or via Bluetooth and voila – you have a full video/audio monitor with plenty of extra goodies.
Here’s my look at the Best Baby Monitor in action.
Let me quickly run through how it all works and some of the great extra features. When you open the app you assign one device as the parent unit, the other as the child unit. The child one stays in the baby’s room. Just make sure the camera is pointed at he child’s crib. When both devices are turned on, they automatically connect. On the parent unit you see the video feeding coming from the baby unit.
But that’s not all this app offers. As I showed you in the video, if the baby unit has a flash, you can turn it on using the parent unit to light up the room when it’s dark. That way you can always see what’s going on. In my testing, I’ve never woken our baby daughter by turning on the light. I’ll point out here, the video feed you’re seeing isn’t HD, but really, does it matter? As long as you can make out what your little one is doing.
If your child is restless, you can even play a lullaby for them. Or better yet, tap the microphone icon and you can talk to your child without being in the room.
Best Baby Monitor even offers a cool feature if you don’t want to use the video feed or only have an iPhone. Turn on the Alert Call Feature. What this does is allow you to leave the phone in the room, and then set it to either 5, 10 or 20 seconds of noise. Once the baby makes noise for that amount of time, the phone will call whatever number you’ve programmed in. If you’re using a couple of iOS devices you can even set it up with FaceTime.
As a parent of two, I wish I would have had this for our first child, and now I can’t imagine not using it with our second. It’s so simple to set up and use and works perfectly. I highly recommend Best Baby Monitor for all parents. Even if you don’t have a newborn, you could always use it to monitor your older kids when they are in other rooms.
