There’s no question that nowadays everyone is kind of camera mad. Not only are we all carrying around the things in our phones, and being spied on by any agency with a budget and a snooping team, but we also seem to enjoy watching things. All the time. Anywhere.

Take, for example, the current trend for parents to keep tabs on their young ones. It’s now reached the point where you can’t enter a house without facing a battery of household CCTVs, pointing every which way. It’s enough to make you positively paranoid.

This Motorola WiFi Baby Monitor is exactly the kind of product we’re talking about, since it’s perfect for doing the kind of round the clock surveillance your little one needs when it’s too small to ask for room service. The device features a full WiFi compatible camera, with remote pan, tilt and zoom and infrared lighting for ultra low light viewing.

It also comes with a temperature monitor to tell you what the ambient temp is in the baby’s room, and even features a microphone and speaker, so you can hold long involved conversations with your 4 month old. You might say it’s fully featured. Check our hands on video below for more details.

In Use
The first thing you have to do is set it up to work with your home WiFi network, and as you’ll see from the video below, this involves some steps which you need to do in a particular order, otherwise the system will not recognize the camera properly. Once that’s done, you can access the camera from anywhere on your smartphone or tablet computer.

There’s a free app called Monitor Everywhere, which does all the clever stuff using an Internet server, probably deep in the bowels of the Motorola empire. Or not. As you might expect, the video quality is not super high resolution, but it’s definitely good enough to see what needs to be seen, and of course the mic lets you hear as well. So in that regard, we have to say the thing definitely works as advertised.

Conclusion
This puppy is about as full featured as any CCTV camera we’ve looked at, and although fiddly, the set up is pretty straightforward once you understand what order you have to do things in (hint: make sure you download the free app onto your phone or tablet before you start the set up process, and follow the instructions *carefully*).

The addition of pan, tilt and zoom is a definite plus, which makes the camera even more useful long term, as you can use it to keep tabs on other creatures such as your pets or favorite doddery aunt, which is a bonus.

So all in all, we have to give it a solid recommendation. Our own hesitation lies in the rather poor video quality, it’s a shame they didn’t improve the camera chipset at the design stage, because it’s something which takes the edge off the overall experience. But then again, it’s supposed to be a baby cam right? Who needs high res for that, except grandma on her Galaxy Tab?

The product is priced at $249.99 in the US and £64.50 in the UK.