Gynoii Baby Monitors

Disclaimer: I received this product heavily discounted in exchange for my honest, unbiased review.

I recently purchased two Gynoii WiFi Video Baby Monitor Cameras for Smart Phone with Free App. One for each of my children's bedrooms. I'll first say that these are a huge step up from the regular audio monitors we used to use. As I'm expecting baby number 3 we wanted something more than unreliable low range often static filled audio to keep track of our precious little ones. I'm a big fan of pro and con lists so here I go. 

Pros

• I love being able to see my children through the video! I can see if they are playing when they should be asleep, breathing when it's so quiet that I wonder, or whatever else I am worried about at the moment. 
• Snapshots! I love being able to get photos of them sleeping. 

• Video quality is good and I like that I can adjust it if I need more bandwidth. 
• You can see in full color when it's light but best of all I can still see my kids clearly at night because the camera automatically switches to high quality infrared when it gets dark. 
• Security! Once my cameras are registered to my account they cannot be accessed by anyone else. One account per camera but I can have multiple cameras on my account; which I love. 
• Another feature I enjoy is that up to 4 devices can access our account video feed from anywhere. That means my husband can check in when he's at work or we can put the camera where we can keep an eye on the baby sitter while were out. 
• The app enables to use a guest account for family that's far away. My parents are not nearby by and it kills my mom not to see her grandkids so we enabled a guest account; all she had to do was download the app and log in. She got to watch us put the kids to bed. We waved and blew kisses. It made her night. Also I can turn it off at any time so we don't feel like we are being spied on.
• Movement and sound alerts. I'm a fairly deep sleeper so I liked that I could enable the app to alert me if there are sudden movements or noises from my children. Also you can vary the sensitivity so you don't get an alert every time your child rolls over (or you can if you'd like). I appreciate this feature because you'll see in the next section that there are some issues with the sound itself. 
• The time-lapse video feature is very entertaining. I never knew how much my kids move around in their sleep before. It's not really a necessary feature but very fun.

Cons

• There's really no manual. All that came with it is a small quick start guide that is far from comprehensive. A lot of the features are fairly to figure out however, I still struggled to get it set up and I even went to their website for answers. I ended up watching a third party video online. I wish there was included something more detailed with the product itself.
• Speaking of the website. The home/product pages are basically just infographs. The FAQs were the most helpful but even still several of the questions were either not answered at all or unclear. I found that several of my questions weren't even on the list. 
• Camera goes offline a lot. This is quite irritating. I usually can get it back but refreshing the screen or closing out of the app entirely and opening it again but I feel like I shouldn't have to. In fact it really scared me few day ago when we had a power outage and even after it came back on and our internet reconnected one of my camera feeds was MIA for sometime, as if I'd never linked it at all. I thought I was going to have to reinstall everything. 

• Sometimes it won't let me login. It'll say I need an internet connection even though I have one.

• There is a slight delay. It can take a few seconds to load when I open the app. The sound is delayed slightly more than the video. Sometimes in my rather small house I can hear them through the walls before I can here them on the app but I think in a bigger home it's a small enough delay that it wouldn't be an issue.
• About the sound, it's not very loud. Unless my app is set in the audio only mode (which makes it function more like a standard monitor) I can barely hear what's going on in there.  Audio only improves the sound a little but I still wish I could crank up the volume. 
• There is a feature that is supposed to enable you to talk to your child through the monitor but when trying it out with my 5 year old she couldn't really hear or understand me and neither could I hear her responses very clearly. Kinda a bust. It's easier to just get up and go in her room. It's too bad because if this worked properly it'd be really handy for anytime I'm not home and wanted to communicate with my child. 
• This last one may be more of a personal preference but there is a feature giving you the option to play a lullaby to your child thru the camera. However there appears to be no volume control. The lullaby is quite loud and I don't think it would be soothing to anyone. I definitely couldn't sleep through it. 

Conclusion: 

Sadly my cons list is slightly longer and weightier than my pros list. I still like my new monitors. They are a gigantic improvement on my older audio monitor and have features I truly love. However there are some flaws that I can't overlook such as the lack of audio control and the crashing of the cameras so often. Overall it's OK. I'm content that I got what I paid for but I don't know if I would feel the same if I had paid full price. If they provide a real manual with more information/answers and can work out some of the kinks with the app connection and volume then I'd be much more likely to recommend it to a friend. 3 Stars.