Netgear Arlo Go review: Wireless LTE video surveillance

The Arlo Go is a wireless camera specifically intended for video surveillance. It is wireless because it works without cables: it is powered by a 3660mAh battery and connects to LTE via a SIM card. And it is specific to video surveillance because it can detect motion or hear noises, it also has a night mode with infrared LEDs, and it uploads footage to the Netgear cloud. The Arlo Go costs (Check on Amazon.com) in online stores. It has a higher price than some rival cameras, but it includes the Arlo Basic package that gives you 7 days of recordings – and up to 5 cameras – always accessible on the cloud. The camera can also save photos and movies to a microSD card, but archiving everything on remote servers is a more popular security measure.

The Arlo Go frame is IP65 certified so it can withstand all weather conditions. On the bottom, it has a screw connection for wall installations, but the flat base covered with an anti-slip material allows it to be used even on a plane surface. Go gets its form from previous Arlo cameras, but it’s just a little more chubby in order to accommodate the battery. The battery can be charged with the power adapter included in the package: it has a reinforced micro-USB plug and a thick cable about 2 meters (6.5ft) long. It delivers 5V and 1.3A or 9V and 1.1A, so it can not be easily replaced by a common smartphone or tablet charger. However, you can also charge the battery with a solar panel, on sale for (Check on Amazon.com).

The Arlo Go battery guarantees at least 10 days of autonomy. In our tests, with video quality set at the highest setting, cloud saving and push notifications turned on, and frequent recording activation due to a motion sensor adjusted to the maximum sensitivity (installed on the window with view of the road below, it activated at the passage of each car and each bird that entered its field of view), it consumed just 7% in 16 hours. That means 10.5% of battery life every 24 hours.

With less extreme adjustments for a more day to day use, the Arlo Go can reach up to two weeks of autonomy. With the motion sensor that activates only in certain time slots, or only when needed (for example, you can turn on the GeoFencing feature to turn motion recognition on/off only when you are near the camera; Arlo Go uses the GPS of the smartphone to read our location), and with video quality set on “Automatic”, it could guarantee up to three weeks of autonomy.

Hard to ask for more: the camera requires a 4G connectivity to communicate with the Internet and, therefore, with the app. There is no Wi-Fi and you can not boot it up without a SIM card inserted. The Arlo Go captures a 720p resolution video at a 130° angle. Movies are recorded in H.264 at 24 fps with mono AAC audio. They last from 10 to 120 seconds: a 10-second recording at the highest quality takes up 1.4MB of space. With an 8GB microSD card, you can, therefore, record about 19 hours of footage.

For the rest, the Arlo Go inherits the capabilities of the Netgear line of cameras. You can switch off the front status LEDs to make it more discreet, you can rotate the image 180°, activate night vision or not (it can see up to 7.6m/25ft), zoom in optically up to 8x, enable or not the built-in microphone and speaker (useful both to activate the siren and to speak remotely in order to communicate with someone), and program the activation based on the day and time.

The Arlo Go is part of Netgear devices compatible with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and IFTTT. On the Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV, Chromecast, Android TV and iOS, the voice commands serve to stream video from the camera to the built-in display or a connected screen. This is a very useful integration when you have an Arlo video surveillance system formed by multiple devices.

Final considerations

The Arlo Go is recommended if you need to add a wireless camera to a security system, which is specific for outdoor use and suitable for motion recognition as well as sound activation. However, the autonomy that depends on the internal battery does not make it completely independent; if you need constant monitoring, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, it is recommended to combine the Arlo Go (Check on Amazon.com) with the solar panel (Check on Amazon.com). The price of the kit is high, but part of the expense is due to cloud storage of the last 7 days of registrations. More information, and the full manual, can be found on arlo.com.