SwitchBot, the company behind a button-pressing robot that turns dumb buttons smart, has been rapidly expanding its catalog of smart home devices in recent years. Those range from the super niche—things like a smart candle warmer—to the useful and compelling gimmickry of a smart hub with an IR transmitter that lets it act as a Matter-enabled universal remote. For one of the company’s newest products, the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell, the gimmick is a connected indoor display that acts as a chime, digital peephole, and video storage device, among other things.
SwitchBot isn’t the only company to offer such a combo, but it is the cheapest I’m aware of at $149.99. That’s compared to something like the $380 Eufy Smart Display E10 and Video Doorbell E340 combo or pairing a $100 Google Nest Hub with a $180 Google Nest Doorbell Cam. And it has a lot of good ideas beyond those I listed above.
SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell
A dedicated video monitor and local storage aren’t enough to save the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell from itself for most people.
- Included video monitor
- Local storage
- Wired and Battery power options
- Matter compatibility (sort of)
- Terrible video quality
- Limited detection features
- Limited aspect ratio
- Grating, tinny audio
- Finicky software
It’s a shame, then, that the Smart Video Doorbell itself is one of the worst smart home cameras I’ve ever used. Its big problem is that the company whiffed it on the actual video doorbell part. The camera produces muddy, awful video at the wrong aspect ratio, the onboard speakers of both the doorbell and display are terrible, and the whole affair is driven by smartphone software that’s unreliable, at best. Despite it all, I still think this camera might have a place. But that place is decidedly not next to my front door.
Good on paper, and nowhere else
I had a number of reasons to look at SwitchBot’s Smart Video Doorbell. Its supposedly 2K resolution video recordings are local by default; it’s battery-powered but can also be wired up; it’s Matter-compatible (with a big asterisk that I’ll get to); it’s got a 165-degree field of view (again, asterisk). If you have a paired SwitchBot smart lock, the Smart Video Doorbell can read the NFC chip on your smartphone or a SwitchBot tracking device in order to unlock it.
The indoor monitor component is what really caught my eye, though. It’s a smallish, square device with a 4.3-inch display that can either be wall-mounted or placed on a table using a built-in kickstand—near a power outlet, though, as it uses a power cable that’s only about four-feet long. Below the display are four buttons, including one to view the camera’s live feed, one to lock or unlock your door (assuming you have a SwitchBot smart lock), and one to pop up a list of generic, robotic replies asking visitors to leave a message or telling them someone will be at the door soon. A feature in the SwitchBot app supports user-recorded replies, so, obviously, I fired up YouTube to grab soundbites from “Angels With Filthy Souls,” the fake movie inside of Home Alone. Then I had my child ring the doorbell so I could answer with them. We laughed and laughed.
The display comes with a microSD card slot already filled with a 4GB microSD card for local recordings, which I think is enough, but the device officially supports up to 512GB memory cards for those who need more. Having the memorycard live inside an indoor device is nice, and not something every local-first video doorbell does, so kudos to SwitchBot. It’s part of why this doorbell works without an internet connection, another nice feature. In fact, you never actually need to connect the Smart Video Doorbell to an app or the internet at all, as the monitor comes paired with it. Although, in my testing, the camera didn’t actually record video when I used it without connecting it to the SwitchBot app.
© Wes Davis / Gizmodo
Beyond the video monitor, SwitchBot’s camera just slides right off the rails. I’m not a fan of the camera’s design, and I can’t stand the scratchy, tinny speakers in either it or the video monitor. Its video quality is atrocious, and the camera didn’t seem to produce recordings anywhere near the 2K resolution SwitchBot claims it’s capable of. Those I checked on the microSD card were 640 x 360 at most, in fact. If there are circumstances in which the camera will actually grab a 2K video, I didn’t encounter them. I asked SwitchBot for clarification on this, and I’ll update this review if I get an answer.
Right after setting the Smart Video Doorbell up, I saw another issue—its 165-degree FOV is great on paper, but SwitchBot’s choice to use a 16:9 aspect ratio meant only the edge of my porch floor was in view, despite the camera being mounted at the low end of SwitchBot’s recommended mounting height of 1.2 to 1.5 meters. Compare that to the Google Nest Doorbell, which uses a square aspect ratio and captures about as much lateral area as the SwitchBot camera while getting way more of what’s above and below it.
© Screenshots by Wes Davis / Gizmodo
Not being able to see much of my porch means I couldn’t check the camera to see if, say, a package is there—one of the main reasons I even want a video doorbell on my porch in the first place. That wouldn’t be as big a deal if I could count on the Smart Video Doorbell to always catch it when someone is delivering a package, but it routinely missed people approaching my porch, especially when they were quickly in and out the way so many delivery drivers are.
Stingy, sluggish software
It’s not much better on the software side of things. The SwitchBot app is immediately annoying about promoting its cloud storage service. Thankfully, you can turn off its pestering reminders if you explore the app’s settings deeply enough. But then there are other weird choices, like that motion detection and recording are both turned off by default, or that video recordings are set to end after just five seconds.
At home and on the same Wi-Fi network, it takes many seconds to load the live feed, occasionally failing. When I left for a few days while reviewing it, I could hardly get it to load at all. And while I could get the live feed to load in the Alexa app, I never could in Google Home after adding the camera there. That’s a harsh contrast to the video monitor, which shows the live feed almost immediately when the doorbell button is pressed. It was also consistently a struggle to load recordings in the SwitchBot app, either by navigating to the camera’s timeline via the app, or by tapping a motion notification on my phone. Most smart home security cameras have these issues here and there, but for the Smart Video Doorbell, it was constant.
© Screenshots by Wes Davis / Gizmodo
Third-party support is a little confusing all around. The Smart Video Doorbell has a settings menu labeled “Third-party Services,” but this seems to just be a way of linking your general SwitchBot ecosystem to others. That is to say, the doorbell shows up when I link SwitchBot to Google Home or Amazon Alexa, but not for Samsung SmartThings or Siri Shortcuts. Apple Home isn’t supported. Also, although this package has Matter support, that’s only referring to the video monitor’s ability to bridge a SwitchBot smart lock to other ecosystems via the universal standard. Matter only just gained smart home camera support in version 1.5 of the standard, and as of this writing, only Samsung SmartThings has updated to that version.
Lastly, the SwitchBot app is a little light on typical smart camera features. You can set a single detection zone by resizing a rectangle on the video feed, but there’s no privacy blackout feature. The app has scheduling and a sensitivity slider, but you can’t turn off, or adjust the brightness of, the blinding LED lights that turn on when someone approaches the camera at night. And human detection is the only specific motion detection category that’s included with a free plan; you have to pay for one of SwitchBot’s cloud subscriptions for vehicle and pet detection (both are things that my Netatmo camera has been able to do for free since I bought it in 2019). That costs at least $3.99 a month for a single camera—which isn’t bad!—and doesn’t include package detection.
Who this doorbell could be for
© Wes Davis / Gizmodo
All of my complaints aside, there are the makings of a good video doorbell here. Local storage, the fact that it works without Wi-Fi, easy setup, and its SwitchBot smart lock integration are all great things. But the problems I listed make it a bad choice if you want all the smart home bells and whistles that come with many smart home security cameras.
But there’s one kind of person the Smart Video Doorbell might be ideal for. Its indoor video monitor makes it ideal for non-tech-savvy folks, especially those with limited mobility, since it means they can see who’s at their door without getting up, and they don’t have to futz with an app to do it. And if you don’t care about ever having recordings and just want a fancy digital peephole and intercom, it’s great for that, too. Bad video quality, inconsistent event sensing, and fancy algorithmic detection features really don’t matter, then.
But everyone else should just look elsewhere. There’s just too much competition from the likes of Eufy, Reolink, and others whose cameras also prioritize local video storage but that produce better video quality, offer more features, and can detect, record, and show events with much greater reliability. I’ve never used a smart home security camera that I thought was perfect, doorbell or otherwise, but the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell misses the mark in too many areas, making it a doorbell camera for almost nobody.
