Performance (continued):

Alternately you can view a live stream from the dashcam if you enabled cloud services. I really liked the idea of this but there are a couple of pitfalls you should be aware off. If you were hoping to be able to view a live feed from your car parked on the street, this is not likely. While the DR650S seems to transmit a fairly strong Wi-Fi signal but its antennas to connect to a hotspot are a bit weak. So in my case; with the vehicle parked about 30 feet from the router it couldn’t find the network at all. But my mobile device had a fairly strong signal. The same mobile device had a fairly strong DR650S signal at my router. So it appears this is really designed to connect through your mobile device’s hotspot or a vehicle equipped with a LTE connection. That works out fine when you are driving but I doubt you are going to leave your phone in the car, at least not on purpose. The other issue is you can only have (3) hotspots for it to connect to. This seems too limited; in the average household you will have at least two drivers so that leaves only one slot open. If you add your home network there are no open spots for work or anything. But again with such limited range it might not be an issue for you. The final concern is bandwidth, many people don’t have unlimited data plans or consistently fast enough connections to support up to 8Mbps. So if you were to max out your 10 minutes per day every day of the month you would use about 18GB of data. But if you are aware of this the functionality is actually quite good. Not only can you see the videos on the microSD card and cloud but you can speak through the DR650S. I was able to see a live view of either camera and get the GPS coordinates of the vehicle. Also as you can see below the app does indeed track your cloud usage by the second. Another nice feature was getting push notifications on my phone when things happened. For instance while sitting at the pool I got an alert that my car detected an impact, reviewing the footage revealed it was my son looking for his sunglasses and the impact was him closing the door.




Initially I did not like the voice guidance but this has kind of grown on me. I like when it alerts me to it changing state and letting me know there was an event the night before. But if this is not for you the menus allow you to disable these messages, but what is very thoughtful is they allow you to pick and choose what feedback you want. I appreciate this over the all or nothing approach some devices take. One improvement I would like is the ability to replay a message. Often I would hear the camera say something but couldn’t decipher it due to a window being open or the radio being on. Having a button to repeat the last message would be helpful.

I also got to confirm the functionality of the Power Magic Pro. When I installed this I set it to enable Parking Mode, to run for an infinite amount of time and to shut off when the battery voltage hit 12V. When I went out Monday morning the video recorder was no longer active and the LED on the box was off. Inserting the key into the ignition my gauge reported right around 12V. This left me enough juice to get the car started. Nice to know I won’t be left stranded, at least not at the fault of this device.