Living Review meaning that I make updates as time goes on. It's simply too early to make final, detailed notes about the product.tl;dr-Arlo provides a basic, well-rounded solution, but its connectivity and solution are not well thought out, with significant security and usability issues. It gives you "just enough" to keep an eye on things and no more.UPDATE 12/20: The cameras were still going strong with full battery. I had to disconnect them due to a move, so they're now in storage which is a rather chilly facility. Come late Feb or March, I'll have the box shipped up to me and we'll see if they're out of juice. In summary though, I did not experience any of the battery problems others did, despite these all being mounted outside.I had one issue with one camera where I had to reboot it for whatever reason. It happened twice. But I was able to do it from the mobile app. The entire system conked out on another occasion, but I think that was due to an internet outage where it needed to be reset.UPDATE 10/28: Despite other reviewers complaining about the batteries I'm still showing full on all three. My guess: They're dealing with outrageous cold, like under 30 degrees. The coldest it's been so far out in Western Washington is about 37 degrees-ish. But it's been raining a lot, cold fog, headache heat, etc. Batteries still strong.Although every now and again I will fire up the app only to have it tell me cameras are offline, when I know they're not. I have to force close the app and reopen it to get it to work.One of the cameras which is high up catches nothing in the close range, but triggers on buses that pass through the trees about 30 feet away. Weird.Insects love these cameras, so I'm constantly getting hit with false alarm notifications.UPDATE 9/9: Funny thing about the motion detection. If an object is moving directly away from the Arlo, it'll pick it up immediately. One of the three which can only see things moving from it, did a great job capturing my lawn guy from 2 seconds in. However, if an object is moving towards the Arlo, it'll fail to catch the person until, as others have mentioned, the person is walking out of frame. I tested this myself by walking the perimeter of my home, which should have set off all three cameras. Only one did, and my back was visible for a split second.Despite Arlo's insistence that objects must "pass by" the camera, one camera is mounted in such a way that anything walking in my backyard should trigger it, period. It didn't. 10 feet away, as indicated by Arlo, didn't matter. The only time it triggered was when I was right up to the door (about 5 feet from the camera and to the side). So yeah, motion detection is fundamentally worthless because the camera doesn't wake up when it should.I attached a photo showing the night view from the backyard. The thing with this is, light is streaming all throughout the backyard because the light is omnidirectional; you can see all the way to the fence perimeters. But the camera can't see any light beyond maybe 10 feet. Dropcam maximizes night vision so much that it might as well be black & white daylight, using the same kind of light.Full Version-I have a rather large house. I wanted something that would let me see around the house while I'm working on improvements to the home and property. I got this system to add to an existing Dropcam Pro Wi-Fi Wireless Video Monitoring Security Camera that covers half of the front of my property (I'm telling you, LARGE house). I considered getting additional Nest Cams to add to the existing, but can't justify the extra money per month for basic recorded data. I also have a Ring Wi-Fi Enabled Video Doorbell which lets me see walkups with two-way, but it has extremely limited range and width.In comes Arlo.WHAT I LIKE-Arlo, I can put it outdoors.The Dropcam/Nest Cam fails in this regard. Common sense. I have the Dropcam pointed out of an upper window, but it's fundamentally useless at night if I turn on the lights in that room unless I turn it to night mode. Night mode is fine, we're talking about a property lit with at least two street lights and four house lights.Arlo, truly wireless.Again, Dropcam/Nest Cam fail in this regard because they are required to be plugged in to power at all times. Even still, if the wireless goes out or has a problem, you have to reboot the Dropcam anyway.Arlo, access to at least some basic recorded footage, at no charge.Dropcam/Nest Cam fail in this regard because no recordings are included with the product. I find this a bit silly given that the device is actually streaming footage up to a cloud server, so it's not like they couldn't give you access to 24 hours worth of footage.Arlo, much easier to mount and position.I actually called out the fact that Dropcam's bottom plate is a horrible design, to the point I stopped using it and just created my own bracket to hold the camera in its current place. Also, the USB cord that powers the Dropcam gets in the way of true pivot flexibility. Also the Dropcam stands out like a sore thumb no matter where you put it, where the Arlo can fit into pretty much any nook or cranny, totally out of view, even in a tree where you don't expect cameras to be (but obviously, birds might be an issue).Arlo, knows enough to ignore shadow changes as motion.Dropcam will react to anything moving. Anything. With where my house is, the various trees and roof line throw shadows that move across the yard, plus as cloud cover goes by, the sun goes from hidden to visible within seconds. I get false alerts all the time because of this.Arlo, significantly more cost effective.Dropcam/Nest Cam's $200 per camera price wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have the subscription. Likewise, if the full camera were only $99, the subscription wouldn't be so bad. They've got a pricing model issue that they can't recover from, and it's depressing that being owned by Google hasn't fixed this.WHAT I DON'T LIKE-Arlo's night performance is HORRIBLE. I mean you pretty much have to have enough ambient light as to make night vision moot, just to make it work. That defeats the purpose of night vision. (I'll try to get photos uploaded to show this effect).Dropcam/Nest Cam's night vision performance truly impressed me. In situations of near pitch black I was able to make out at least some basic details.Arlo's image delay is at times between 5-10 seconds. This seems to be exacerbated by three things: signal quality of the base unit, signal quality of your viewing device, and normal cloud/client latency.Dropcam has an image delay as well, but it's a more reasonable 2-4 seconds. This is likely because the Dropcam connects directly to your router (WiFi), rather than needing a separate "director" which adds overhead.Arlo has no audio functionality. Makes it fundamentally useless as an indoor camera.Dropcam has audio detection as well as 2-way communication (if you care) and audio recording with shockingly good clarity and range.Arlo picks up leaves moving in a tree as motion. (I finally got it to stop doing this at 50% sensitivity, but that might have an impact on true motion detection. Not sure yet)Dropcam might do the same, but Dropcam (with a subscription) lets you set a zone outside of where a tree might be, with fine controls, to avoid this issue. Arlo doesn't use zones, so you're stuck with whatever it sees.Arlo requires a base unit, which is basically a 802.11n router that you can't use otherwise.Dropcam requires no base unit, only power. Additionally, the Arlo base unit broadcasts as a generic NETGEAR hotspot, and Netgear's site states that the password is "long" and "not given out". That seems to imply that someone there at Netgear has the password or can get it, and they won't let you change it. This is a HUGE security problem, because the Netgear router has to be hardline connected to your existing router, and you can't block it out from internal resources. I plan to figure out some other way to give this thing internet without giving it local LAN access because it's a serious problem. Not sure why they didn't go with a non-standard protocol for this that doesn't allow direct connect or SSID access. I may have to do some sort of PoE solution to give direct access to the modem, but I really dislike that workaround.Arlo's base unit requires Ethernet (physical) connection, rather than just connecting to your existing hotspot as a WiFi client, with Ethernet as a secondary option for those that don't have wireless.Dropcam requires no physical connection. Additionally, the need for physical connection on the Arlo means you're limited as to where you put it in your home. It also means you have less control over what that device can do on your network. The base station is actually a router, which means you're creating a contradictory hotspot, which has a strong probability of interference with your own. If it were a WiFi client, it could connect to anything: a home router, a mobile hotspot, a public hotspot (which I do have access to), etc., but I could control its access any way I wanted. As is it's an inflexible option.Arlo takes up to 10 seconds to show live footage.Dropcam is all of 2-3 seconds to get to a live stream. Again, it has no base station in the way, thus minimal overhead. You're viewing things directly at the server level after capture has taken place (thus the delay in image) but there's minimal overhead getting there.Arlo doesn't record all the time (thus the battery life). It records when (A) you tell it to, up to two minutes, or (B) it detects motion, up to two minutes. This means you might miss something that took place and wasn't caught by the camera due to the image delay I mentioned. It also means that if your motion sensitivity isn't "just right", you might miss motion that was there that the camera botched. Because it doesn't use zones, you wouldn't point the Arlo at places you don't want alerts about, but that means you'll miss motion that you might care about (see below).Dropcam/Nest Cam is constantly recording a stream to the cloud. If you subscribe, you can access up to X days in the past, at any point, and create clips. This came in handy recently, where there was an accident right in front of my house. Dropcam caught the point of impact perfectly, but it was outside of a zone, so I didn't get notified. But once I knew when it happened, I was able to go back in time and get the clip for police and the victim's insurance company. VERY useful.Arlo throws frequent errors that it can't reach the server (arlo.netgear.com) despite having full internet access at good speeds.Dropcam has never thrown a server failure error. The only error it throws is after a wireless connectivity drop, you have to restart the Dropcam to get it to resync, but wireless connectivity drops are rare and usually due to something the homeowner did (or didn't do). The only other issue is with the Dropcam app, where sometimes if you don't keep it up to date it won't let you connect to the camera until you update it.Arlo's app interface is clunky and needlessly deep. You can't change camera settings from the camera live view; you have to go two menus deep in Settings. The motion sensitivity and other tuning settings aren't under each camera, they're under other options like "Rules". The "Rules" don't attach to each camera, so if you didn't rename cameras before creating the rules, you get confused as to which is doing what. The app needs SERIOUS work - from a developer's perspective.Dropcam has a single menu with everything in it, per camera.Arlo's initial setup was EXTREMELY painful. Each camera is paired to the base with what appears to be WPS (WiFi Protected Setup). That's fine, but it takes the base station nearly 2 minutes to set itself up after connecting Ethernet. Then you need to create an account on the mobile app; but it requires you be on the same wireless network as the device. So if you don't have wireless you can't set this thing up despite it being a router itself! Why? Why do this? Why not just have the thing act like a router (since it IS a router) - create a hotspot. Allow a user to connect to that hotspot. App sets up the device. Allow user to change the password and encrypt it to the device. Then pair each camera using the encrypted credentials. It's not rocket science, Ring Doorbell can do it!Dropcam, you give it power, then you hold up your phone to let the camera see a special code. That's it.Arlo, at one point, threw a message that "someone else has logged in". Like a symptom of the security issue I mentioned before, but what was really bad about this is that it highlighted the fact that you can only have one device at a time monitoring videos.Dropcam, I've run both my computer and phone at the same time without a problem. It just works.So in summary (if you kept up this long!), the Arlo sacrifices flexibility, control and authority for basic functionality. It'd be like buying a car that has no air conditioning, no radio, and no power steering. Yes, you can drive it from A to B, if that's all you care about.Dropcam/Nest Cam is costly, but for that price you get pretty much everything except outdoor mounting and true wireless. Its level of control is amazing and it doesn't have a lot of the quirks seen with other systems. That said I think the camera itself is overpriced, frankly. $99 is a more reasonable price point here.If you're trying to get a full scale video system indoors with recording storage, Dropcam/Nest Cam is the way to go. If you're trying to set up home security, you're looking in the wrong place and need to seek Alarm.com or ADT or Xfinity Home or one of the other providers.