 Parents already know this, but for the uninitiated among you, stick around for a second and I'm gonna open your mind. You know when you put gaming edition and some flashing LEDs on something, it makes it worth twice as much for some reason? Putting four babies on something automatically makes it an order of magnitude more expensive. Eight pound box of rags for cleaning tough spills like paint? 25 bucks. Special rags with adorable phrases on the front for cleaning spittle and mushed peas? Wow, a whole three pack for only $20? However, will you make a profit on that? All right, so I guess you get the point. Parents are used to getting fleeced on anything that someone can convince them makes life better for their little bundle of joy. So when I saw the Mimo Smart Baby Monitor with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi powered by Intel Edison, the geek in me went, OMG, it goes on my baby and it has Bluetooth and freaking Wi-Fi. Are you freaking kidding me? Sign me up. Well, the parent in me went, Really? Another $200 for like a starter pack? Are you kidding me? Oh, well, I guess I could sell my 5960X and get a Pentium Anniversary Edition and then I could have this for my baby. Which by the way, we'll be doing a head-to-head comparison of soon in gaming, so make sure you're subscribed for that. And then I clicked the checkout button. So here we go. Is the rest devices Mimo an amazing blend of technology and cuteness? Or is it another scam to steal copious amounts of money from casuals just like fitness wearables? Let's find out, shall we? Corsair Gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB keyswitches for 16.8 million color-per-key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization. Click now to learn more. We'll begin with what you get in the starter box. A Lilypad that charges the monitoring turtle and acts as a wireless communications base station for Wi-Fi to interact with your phone and Bluetooth for the turtle. A wall wart and flat green USB cable to power the Lilypad. A 3.5mm audio cable that you'll use to program the Lilypad and three cotton machine washable onesies or kimonos in either 0-3, 3-6 or 6-12 month sizes. And of course the aforementioned Bluetooth turtle. I guess that's also in there. Putting the kimono on is as easy as any other baby clothing. So a piece of cake if she's not fussing and squirming but otherwise a bit more challenging. Just lay her down on it, put her arms through the appropriate openings, do up the two buttons on the right side, do up the buttons on the left side, then pull the bottom under the diaper and do up those three buttons at the front. If you can, I've been using these kimonos for a couple weeks so they've been through the washer and dryer and even though my little one is a bit tall for her age, my not quite three month old is not really fitting the 3-6 month onesies very well. They're quite snug and I think it would be a bit better if they were pre-shrunk out of the box to give a better idea of what sizing will be like. So I left the three bottom ones undone in my testing. Let's move on to the app which is available for iOS and Android. Go through the wizard to create an account and then use the 3.5mm cable with the volume turned up to max on your phone to connect the lilypad to your home wifi network and bind your lilypad internal to the phone with the codes on the bottom. All of which worked pretty seamlessly on iOS. Between my droid turbo and 1M8 and xperia Z2 I borrowed and my wife's moto G, only two of them were able to program the lilypad. But the good news is that the share feature makes it easy to add another device for monitoring that can't program it or just a device that would have worked but one that belongs to a less tech savvy parent or caregiver. So I used that to generate a custom link that I emailed to my wife so she could easily monitor the same turtle on her Android phone. Next to share is the alert button which lets you toggle your notifications on iOS and configure them on Android so you'll be warned about various baby status changes. But it didn't work very well on Android, unfortunately overriding mutant system volume so it actually as she stirred a little bit putting when my wife was putting the baby down to sleep after rocking her it detected a wake event causing her phone in her pocket to go off and actually wake the baby again. iOS didn't have that problem though. Then there are three tabs at the bottom, the live monitor tab shows you the position the baby's in, monitors her temperature and the temperature of the room that the lilypad is in as well as letting you listen like a normal baby monitor by pressing the play button. But while the position detection works reasonably well for rolling it's pretty useless for upright detection and the wakefulness detection is actually much worse reporting that the baby is asleep when she's doing anything from fussing on the ground to sitting in a chair to being rocked by yours truly. And then the audio quality for the listen button is so terrible on the monitor compared to my cheapo baby monitor from Toys R Us that I wouldn't consider it a substitute at all. The timeline tab is much less refined and it's kind of clunky looking on Android and lacks the summary on the bottom that makes it somewhat useful. But on iOS it actually gives you a pretty good look at recent sleeping and waking events on the little timeline which is a neat idea if you want to monitor baby's sleep schedule to try to optimize it. But the problem is that while sometimes it works the sleep monitoring and orientation monitoring is so unreliable that I wouldn't count on this to give me any kind of useful information about my child's activity levels. And obviously won't do anything while the turtle which needs to be charged every couple of days is not connected to the kimono so it's again not the kind of thing that I would rely on. And the third tab is settings where you can see some tutorials, manage your multiple lily pads and turtles if you have twins or are very heavily invested in this monitoring ecosystem. Manage the notifications that get sent and change the monitoring temperature units or at least on iOS you can do that. So at this point you're probably sitting there thinking G-Linus, cute baby, thanks by the way. But that Nemo thing looks pretty rubbish for something that you will get maximum one year of use out of even if you're willing to keep investing in more onesies and only onesies for 15 bucks a pop. And Linus you're in pretty good spirits for someone who just basically threw away $200 of your hard earned money as far as I can tell. What's up? And the answer is it's nothing personal against rest devices Inc. specifically or even smart baby monitors in general but I'm actually happy because this product gave me an opportunity to make a little PSA about enticing new tech products especially lifestyle ones from companies that have no proven track record that hopefully you'll share with others you know. When someone is trying to sell you something based on your insecurities and fears things like fitness trackers that help you lose weight or baby monitors that give you peace of mind. Take a moment and put on your common sense goggles and critical analysis caps and try and cut through the BS. Peace of mind from what? Okay so focusing back in on baby monitors here we know that monitors don't prevent SIDS. So what are you preventing other than your own anxiety and is conquering that anxiety just a natural step in the process of learning to be a parent. Are we using these gadgets as a crutch. Are they even a useful crutch if they don't even work that well. Am I really gaining any peace of mind from something that doesn't even appear to monitor the baby correctly. I mean I don't know I mean to be clear I'm not saying that every product is terrible you know like my battery powered audio baby monitors super handy just because it's not always convenient to. Room share with the baby it's nice to be able to go about your day with a thing clipped to your belt loop and know when the baby is waking but you know and who knows this. Sprout laying ankle bracelet thing might be amazing but all I'm trying to say is be patient take the time to find some proper independent media coverage or user reviews of the finished version of this stuff before pre-ordering like everyone seems to be willing to do. You're going to keep paying two hundred dollars for half baked products like memo that in this case aside from their software just being plain not good enough for a finished product. It just wasn't even that thought out in the first place I mean the turtle communicates with the lily pad via Bluetooth so the range drops out like basically outside the room and how is this useful if the baby is asleep in any of the places that a baby might fall asleep other than her crib. Dirt what am I going to do move around the entire station whenever I go anywhere so that I can track her wakefulness she's awake and says she's sleeping I don't know. So I think that's pretty much all I have to say about this guys thanks for watching like if you liked dislike if you dislike leave a comment letting me know if you've been suckered into buying some kind of baby gadget or gizmo that didn't end up being that useful and if you found this video helpful please do share it. Guys as always check out the link in the video description where you can support us you can give us a monthly contribution you can allow I forget all the things right you can buy a cool t shirt like this one or you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so every time you buy baby supplies we get a small kickback it helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe.