Asus recently gave us its latest Reco Smart Car and Portable Cam for review. Although I was initially quite skeptical about using it on my daily drive to work, I slowly got quite attached to it. Here is what I think of the Asus Reco Smart Car and Portable Cam.
To start things off, lets talk about the packaging. From the packaging, it looks a lot like Asus wanted to go for a very science fiction look with the Reco Smart Car Cam. The camera comes in a cylindrical hexagon packaging with the camera screwed on. Sure it looked really cool, but it gets annoying real quick. Once you get past the tapes and the stickers, you get to unscrew the camera from the case, however, screwing it back on later can be quite a task. You then have to open the cardboard packaging where the instruction manual, wires, car dock and car charger are all awkwardly placed. It was easy to get all these stuff out, but putting them back in was not exactly the easiest thing to do.
Now moving on to the actual camera itself, the Asus Reco Smart Car and Portable Cam has a pretty compact design. Shaped like a standard camera lens, the camera is quite easy to carry around, thanks to its shape and size. Going around the camera, you have the mount and memory card slot on top with the microUSB port next to it. Moving along the edge, you have the GPS port, Record button, Power button which doubles as an LED and WiFi indicator, speaker and finally a red SOS button which I will come to in a bit. On the back you have a huge Asus branding which doubles as the NFC sensor and two LEDs for battery status and recording or snapshot notifications.
The Reco Cam comes with a Sony CMOS sensor that can record FHD 1080p videos at 30fps. It is powered by Ambarella SoC and packs a 720 mAh battery, that can give you a couple hours over a full charge. Asus has provided a USB cable with the camera, which they recommend you use. However, I was still surprised that when I use a normal USB cable, the camera would charge really slowly.
The Wifi on the camera comes on automatically when its turned on, at which point you connect it to your phone through its own Wifi network. Additionally, its best to download the app onto your phone, as this will allow you to preview videos, change settings and even livestream to social media. I learned the hard way that to turn the camera off, you have to do a long press till there is a beep sound.
One thing I noticed was the fact that the camera powers up and starts to record as soon as it is plugged in via a USB power source. This is great when you want the camera to be recording as soon as you start your car, however, I accidently left the camera on my desk to charge via USB overnight. This led to a ton of video clippings of my room all night till I took the camera off the charger. Another interesting feature is that the camera saves all videos as multiple files, each a minute long. This makes it easy to browse through videos but can be a pain if you recorded a long drive.
Once its all charged up and ready to go, the camera is pretty straightforward to use. You can either leave it plugged into your car via the car charger, or just fix it on your windshield and hit record. I was initially worried if the camera would leave a mark on my windshield once I remove it, however, removing the camera from the windshield was really easy and didnt leave a single spot on it.
One of the most interesting features on the Asus Reco Smart Cam is the Emergency SOS button. Once you press this red button next to the record button, the camera will instantly record and store immediately. These recordings cannot be recorded over, and you can have upto 10 recordings. This is great if you want to record something and make sure you dont lose the evidence.
Performance wise, the camera is pretty good. It performs well in any condition, and even takes pretty decent pictures. Any video you record also gets stored in high quality and low quality, depending on which one you want to share. You can see a sample of the Reco cam's video recording here.
Here are some picture samples.
Now moving on to the Asus Reco App. Generally the app is pretty decent. You have all your options, settings, recording modes and various other settings highlighted in the app itself. The settings menu provides you with a lot of options on customizing the camera to your preferences as well. However, I felt that the app could use a little polishing as it often crashed mid-way and is quite demanding in terms of battery.
Overall, I actually enjoyed using the Asus Reco Smart Car and Portable Cam. It looks great, works well and is not that complicated to setup and use. For someone who loves to drive, the camera is a great tool, especially in case of an emergency. Reports do suggest that Dashcams are legal now, so it is advisable to get one for your car, as in case of an accident or other emergencies, you always have proof as to what happened.
