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Wyze’s battery-powered outdoor camera can also monitor your hotel room

Wyze’s battery-powered outdoor camera can also monitor your hotel room

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The affordable camera has up to six months of battery life

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Image: Wyze

Wyze’s first outdoor camera — the appropriately titled Wyze Cam Outdoor — is a battery-powered, water-resistant, Wi-Fi security camera designed to be used outside. It costs $49.99 for a starter bundle, including the camera and a base station, or $39.99 for each additional camera. There’s also an offline travel mode that allows the Cam Outdoor to monitor your hotel room, for example. The camera is available in what Wyze is calling “early access” starting today with deliveries expected in mid-July. Widespread availability is expected to follow in early August.

At $49.99, the Wyze Cam Outdoor is a very affordable outdoor camera, but its specs are comparable to more expensive competitors like Amazon’s $99 Blink XT2. It records in 1080p, has an advertised battery life of up to six months, and has a speaker and microphone for two-way audio in case you want to talk to someone through the camera. It supports infrared night vision at up to 25 feet, has an 8x digital zoom, and it’s IP65 water resistant, meaning it’ll survive the spray of rainwater but not a powerful jet.

The $49.99 starter bundle comes with a single camera and a base station.
The $49.99 starter bundle comes with a single camera and a base station.
Image: Wyze

Like Wyze’s other cameras, the Wyze Cam Outdoor can continuously record to microSD cards or record to the cloud without a paid subscription. With the free cloud-recording version, the camera records for up to 12 seconds when it detects motion, and these clips are stored in the cloud for up to 14 days. There is also a cool-down period that’s adjustable between one, three, and five minutes.

Shortly after launch, Wyze says the camera will be compatible with its paid subscription, available for $1.49 per camera, per month. That will remove the 12-second recording restriction and cool-down period, but the 14-day limit remains.

In normal use, the camera connects to the internet via its base station (which connects to your home router via Ethernet) to record, but there’s also an offline travel mode where an internet connection and base station isn’t required. In this mode, the camera emits a Wi-Fi hotspot, which your phone can connect to.

Since it’s battery-powered, the Wyze Cam Outdoor is completely wire-free. It attaches magnetically to its stand, which is then screwed into a wall or... tree. With typical use, Wyze says the camera’s battery should last between three and six months, and it charges over Micro USB. The battery should allow the camera to record continuously to a microSD card for about 10 hours, Wyze says.

Unfortunately, like the rest of Wyze’s camera lineup, the Wyze Cam Outdoor won’t feature person detection for now. The company was forced to remove the feature back in January after the AI company it partnered with, Xnor.ai, was acquired by Apple. Wyze plans to replace the functionality with an in-house version to be released later this year. It did not have any news to announce as part of the launch today, but it promised to share more details soon.

The Wyze Cam Outdoor is just one of the products that the company announced was in development back in February. As well as the outdoor camera and its in-house person-detection feature, Wyze said that it’s also working on the Wyze Band, a wearable smart home assistant and activity tracker, and the Wyze Scale, a health-focused smart scale.