If you’ve been on the internet in the last few weeks, then you’ve probably seen Amazon Ring’s latest demonstration of their new gadget. The Always Home Cam is an autonomous security drone designed to keep an eye on your home when you’re not there. But with so much hype and a lot promised, can the Ring drone really deliver?

The Always Home Drone Cam

The Always Home Cam is the latest innovation of the Amazon Ring. It takes the idea of the Ring doorbell and its security advantages and attaches it to a drone. This drone will fly around your home, patrolling for you when you aren’t home. According to press releases, the drone offers surveillance of every single angle of your home with the flying camera.

Ring says that the Always Home Cam works like any other drone, except it flies autonomously by following pre-set paths, rather than having to be controlled. The drone itself uses a quad copper design with a 1440×1440 HD camera with 120-degree view both up and down, and an inbuilt LED to help with low light. If it senses movement in your home, the drone can fly it’s pre-set paths to monitor activity and allow you to check that everything is OK using the app. You can map up to 50 different routes, and you can tell the drone to pause or return to its charging dock during flight.

However, there are some pretty significant drawbacks. For one, the Always Home Cam doesn’t allow manual user intervention. So if you wanted to see a specific area of your home that wasn’t on a pre-set flight path, you wouldn’t be able to. The drone itself also only has a flight time of 5 minutes before it needs to dock and recharge, which significantly limits its usefulness. The press releases also state that you would need a drone for each level of your home, which suggests they can’t travel upstairs. It’s also pretty loud, matching the volume of a vacuum or a blender when flying. So even though it’s designed to be used when you aren’t home, if you have pets, it could cause some disturbances! And finally, there’s the cost, which is estimated to be around the $249 mark.

Are In-Home Security Drones The Future?

Honestly? It’s pretty unlikely. The idea of in-home security is nothing new, but the use of a drone to do it is impractical, expensive and frankly a bit invasive! This announcement from Amazon has a lot of similarities with their drone delivery announcement – something that shows they are thinking like pioneers, but that they have no intention of actually creating and launching. This is somewhat backed up by the fact that they have been teasing the launch since 2020, and have now said they won’t be released until at least 2024.

So what’s the alternative? Enhanced in-home security features like security cameras, ring doorbells and the like are already available on the market, but many aren’t being used by the mass market yet. So rather than pinning your hopes on an autonomous drone, why not look into existing, tried and tested home security alternatives?

For example, at Securifix we can offer you a complete home security review free of charge with one of our experts. They will assess your property, talk to you about your needs and design a bespoke security system that will work for you. From monitored intruder alarms to CCTV cameras, access control to the property and door entry solutions, we can keep your home safe without relying on untested and still unreleased drones.

To find out more, just get in touch with the team today.