Another one of my rash kickstarter/indiegogo acquisitions, the Nucleus. I purchased the two pack so I could use them to connect to each other.
The units feel like cheap clunky ipads, which they kind of are, much cheaper than ipads. They only do a couple things tho – place a video/audio call to another unit or a phone running the app, receive a call, or act as an alexa device.
I played around with the unit standalone, as a paired set, and with the remote phone client. Some thoughts:
- Way easier to set up than most iot products thanks to the screen, easy to set up the network.
- As an alexa front end, it is adequate. It works just like an Amazon unit, seems to support all the same commands. The speakers are worse than the Amazon Echo or whatever you might attach to an Echo Dot. I wouldn’t use this as a music player, but it is fine for responding to voice queries. Now we already have an alexa in our kitchen and having two alexa devices in the same room is not a good idea.
- As a receiver of calls from the mobile client, I kind of like having a dedicated always-on handsfree device. You can take a call in the kitchen without interrupting what you are doing. And having a dedicated device for the 75% most common call (ie spouse to home) is sensible. I can see some form of this scenario being useful.
- As an initiator of calls to a mobile client, it is useless. I need to have the mobile app open and running or I can’t receive calls.
- As a two-unit video intercom, I am not convinced. We do not have a small house, but I couldn’t figure out why I would put two of these around the house or where I would put them. We don’t have kids in the house, maybe I would like it more then. We do have a vacation place and so I placed one there so our two homes could be connected. However, internet connectivity at the vacation place is squirrelly and after a day, I could no longer connect to the unit at the vacation place. So that scenario isn’t working.
I haven’t thrown it all in a drawer yet like so many others I have trialled but it is not a part of our daily life yet either.
