The recent release of the G2H Pro was limited to Apple stores initially and restricted to Europe back in February. Now the G2H Pro has been launched on Amazon stores as well, which also includes Canada and The United States. Whilst the original G2H is still listed on Amazon, the prices are around the same, so it’s quite likely that the G2H will simply be withdrawn from sale and replaced by the G2H Pro at some point soon.
As we noted back in December when the ‘Pro’ was initially announced in Mainland China, the improvements have been incremental rather than revolutionary, which is understandable in some ways, as the G3 already takes on that role, so if you don’t have a G2H already, then the Pro is the obvious choice, for the reasons listed below;
The G2H Pro is HomeKit compatible, coming with much the same essential functionality, which includes a built-in Zigbee 3.0 hub, whilst also adding hub compatibility for Google, Alexa, and IFTTT. The Pro also now allows your live streams to be viewed on Google and Amazon screen-based devices, which isn’t the case with the standard model.
Visually, the new G2H Pro is almost identical to the original model, with mostly internal upgrades to make the leap to ‘Pro’. The only outward difference is that instead of the blue LED of the G2H, we now have an RGB LED to let you know what different functions the camera is performing – pairing, recording, updating firmware etc.
The Pro is still 1080p, at 20fps, or 24fps for HomeKit Secure video, which it is compatible with. Motion detection is the same, although when it comes to the Aqara alarm system, this is where the Pro finally exposes the alarm to HomeKit, with all four modes supported.
In terms of the lens, there’s a slightly wider field of view, going up from 140º to 146º although whilst the G2H has lens correction to adjust for the fisheye lens effect, we’re told the G2H Pro doesn’t have this and won’t be getting it via any future upgrade.
The Pro can also accommodate SD cards up to 512GB, which is a large leap from the original at just 32GB (officially). The Pro can also support 128 child devices, compared to the original 64.
Only 2.4GHz WiFi is supported compared to the G3 which also supports 5GHz, although also like the G3, it supports WPA3. One aspect that may be a slight drag is that as the new device is pretty much identical to the original, the camera still uses a Micro-USB connection for power. Speaking of which there will be no power supply provided.
The G2H Pro also has a new additional privacy feature, that allows the user to mask certain portions of the camera’s field of view. This is particularly useful if you have the camera pointing outside your home, which will possibly also be able to view your neighbours’ areas, so this hopefully avoids any potentially sticky privacy issues.
Finally, the Pro will support NAS, like the original G2, and will also have a timelapse function, advanced privacy protection, and user-defined ringtones, which means you’ll be able to upload sounds of your own and use them in specific automations.
The G2H Pro is available on Amazon stores in the US (US$69.99), Canada (CA$84.99), Germany (€75,99), France (€75,99), and the UK (UK£69.99), with a special discount code taking 15% off the standard list price through 5th March. For the US, you can use the code WEBG2HPRO (possibly Canada too), whilst purchasing from the EU and UK stores you can use the code G2HPROWEB.
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