Who wants a 360-degree view of their pet?
A favorite among Verge staff, Furbo is a smart dog camera that lets you see, hear, and talk to your pet and — their favorite part — throw treats at them. But it’s had one flaw: your animals roam around all day, and this camera can’t move. (Well, unless you pop it in the back of Amazon’s Astro home robot, but that’s a whole other blog). This week, Furbo fixed that issue with the launch of its new Furbo 360° Dog Camera, which is available now and costs $210 but is launching on Amazon and Furbo.com at the discounted price of $167.
In addition to rotating 360 degrees on its base to catch all the action, the new Furbo has been upgraded with a wide-angle lens, color night vision, and auto dog tracking to automatically follow your pup as they roam around the living room. You can also control the camera remotely.
As with the original Furbo, the new camera includes bark detection, treat-tossing, and two-way talk so you can chat with your pup (no reason why you can’t also keep tabs on your feline friend, though, despite the name).
As many of us head back to the office, leaving our furry friends home alone once again, this type of smart home camera adds an extra level of fun to the standard “just-checking-in-to make-sure-he-hasn’t-eaten-the-couch” security camera. Furbo’s main selling point is that you can use its app to fling treats at your buddy in an Angry Birds-esque interface that shows you a live video of your dog getting the goodies.
The treat-tossing also makes sure they’ll come to where the camera is (they quickly learn to associate the noise that the camera makes with a snack coming their way). But with the new panning capability of the Furbo 360, you’ll be able to rotate the device and see if they’re sleeping peacefully on the couch.
The built-in camera records video in up to 1080p HD video and has a 4x digital zoom, so you can get up closer to see exactly what Fido is chewing on. Speaking of chewing, Furbo has a subscription service called FurboDog Nanny that adds some interesting AI alerts, including ones for continuous barking, howling, or crying. It also adds person alerts and cloud recording of videos (up to 15 seconds), plus a daily 60-second recap of your pup’s moments captured on camera. The Furbo 360 comes with a 30-day trial of FurboDog Nanny, which costs $6.99 a month or $69 annually.
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