Babies and Mobiles – part 1: I can’t hear you….

As some of you may remember, when I joined IntoMobile only a few short weeks ago, I said that I was going to post some entries about the situation of having a new baby, and how my Mobile life relates to it. “Great!” some of you said, and I’m sure equally as many groaned! However, bear with me, and over the course of the next few months, as my little one develops, I’ll share with you some of the interesting, annoying, and bizarre Mobile moments I face…..

…..like this one. The other day we bought baby monitors. Anyone who has a baby, or knows someone that has/had a baby, will be familiar. For those of you that aren’t they are predominantly a pair of audio transmitter/receiver units. When your baby is sleeping in another room, you place the transmitter (which I’ll call Tx from this point) next to the baby, and the receiver (which I’ll call Rx) near you.

The need for these can come quite soon after the baby is born, because you may choose to pop your baby in another room, so it can be (a) in the dark, and (b) nice and quiet for the little chap/chapess. So off we went shopping, and picked up a pair of “Digital” audio monitors, for about £85 – not cheap, and you might want to bear that in mind when you read the next part!

My first alarm bells went off when I saw the Ni-Mh battery for the receiver – now I remember Ni-Cd batteries from when I had a remote control car when younger:

… and what I always remembered was the inordinately long time they took to charge up! Likewise, this Ni-Mh battery was going to take 16 hours to fully charge? What?! My Nokia (NYSE: NOK) charges in a couple of hours!

The next thing that struck me (remember, these monitors cost £85 in a sale!) was the fact these monitors use DECT. Of course, that’s predominantly the technology used in home cordless phones, and a key characteristic of these phones is that call clarity isn’t fantastic. Of course, the one thing you want from a baby monitor that is monitoring audio for your baby is clarity and sensitivity – which they don’t do!

Moving on, we soon found that whilst both monitors come with mains adapter/charger (the Tx unit takes 4xAA battery or the mains, the Rx unit has rechargable Ni-Mh from the mains), often you want the receiver somewhere else than where the charging base unit is – in our case, we have it portable, with us overnight – except the battery doesn’t really last overnight? What? My Nokia does – and for the next day, and the next.

Also, the screen on these monitors is basic monochrome, like your average digital alarm clock – not clear unless it’s being backlit – again, what………?! My Nokia has 1/4 million colours!

And then it finally hit me – these baby monitors had ALL the characteristics that Mobile handsets did, but around 10 years ago – before the WAP ‘revolution’, and before content was big (and the time I happened to work for a Voicemail and SMS company, funnily enough, but that’s another story for another time…).

The ironic thing is that most families would I guess place a premium on communications with their baby/babies (it may be one way, but you always want to hear your baby is OK), yet the equipment (in my opinion) isn’t up to the job – quite a strange, and mildly upsetting, state of affairs.