When Samsung announced their Galaxy S5 flagship smartphone they brought with it an updated TouchWiz user interface, the latest S Apps, and also packed it with some great specs, but what they didn’t mention was that it in fact doubled as a baby monitor.
It has been discovered that if you pair your Galaxy S5 with a Galaxy Gear or Gear 2 smartwatch then you can use the devices in order to monitor your baby in a different room.
The discovery comes as a “baby crying detector” setting was found in the Samsung Galaxy S5’s accessibility menu which uses the devices microphone to detect a baby’s cry and sends a vibrating alert to your paired Galaxy Gear or Gear 2 smartwatch.
The menu mentions that the feature works best when the device is placed in a room with no background noise in order to accurately detect when it hears a baby crying which suggests it doesn’t actually distinguish a crying noise, but in fact listens for loud sudden sounds and reports on them.
Samsung Galaxy S5 Baby Monitor
Unfortunately it seems the functionality seems to have missed a trick, since when will you actually leave your Samsung Galaxy S5 device in your baby’s room? Surely you’d want to keep your $500+ device with you at all times? It would have made more sense to have left the Galaxy Gear or Gear 2 smartwatch in the room using that as a microphone and have that report to your device.
Furthermore, with proper dedicated baby monitors being affordable and probably costing no more than $30 for a fairly basic one, why would you chose to substitute your smartphone for this functionality? That’s probably why Samsung failed to brag about the feature, probably because 99% of users won’t actually use it.
But, what do you guys think? Would you use the Samsung Galaxy S5 as a baby monitor?