Last month, after an advanced preview at CES back in January, Aqara released an update to its G4 smart video doorbell dubbed the Doorbell Camera Hub G410 Select. I had been keeping my eye out for this release ever since its announcement, and it just so happened to coincide with the passing of my existing smart doorbell from Netatmo. That was more than enough reason to purchase the G410, and over a month of daily usage, I’ve been enjoying several of the camera’s excellent new features while also wishing for some improvements in other areas.

Aqara is a stellar producer of smart home accessories. While they have many products that work with their own app, you can also use them with Apple’s HomeKit framework, either in parallel or exclusively. Another big draw of Aqara products is their affordable price tags. While I wouldn’t call any of their devices cheap, they are all fairly priced for what they offer. This holds true for the G410 doorbell, which goes for a perfectly sensible $129.99 on Amazon.

Features

While the design of the G410 isn’t that different from the G4, it boasts several internal upgrades. Available in black or white, the doorbell hub integrates with HomeKit as well as Google Home, Alexa, and SmartThings. While the camera’s HomeKit integration supports streaming and recording with HomeKit Secure Video, Activity Zones, and a limited ability to refine the notifications you receive, the Aqara app provides much more granular customization and additional features, which I’ll get into shortly.

The G410 doorbell can also be set up as a hub for you to pair child devices from Aqara to. The hub comes in the form of a square speaker, which also serves as a doorbell chime and features a microSD card slot for video storage. (Recording to a NAS is an option, too.) I appreciate that Aqara cameras can double as hubs, preventing you from having to buy a clunky, single-purpose hub that sits in your home taking up space.

Like the G4, the G410 provides on-device facial recognition, and the new mmWave sensor is designed to offer better presence detection when someone approaches your door, rather than relying purely on the video picture it captures. The camera has been upgraded to 2K resolution with an impressive 175° angle lens (up from 162°) and still delivers infrared nighttime images. It should be noted that when used with HomeKit, the camera’s video quality is downgraded to 1200p due to restrictions with Apple’s smart home platform. This is disappointing and something I hope Apple plans to rectify in the near future.

The G4 was the first and, until now, only HomeKit-compatible video doorbell able to run solely on batteries; the G410 is the second. Like the G4, the G410 allows you to combine batteries with a hardwired setup to give you that extra peace of mind.

Finally, the G410 video doorbell hub includes support for Matter, dual-band WiFi, standard WPA3 security, a three-month trial of Aqara’s cloud storage, and even a voice modulator to contort your voice as it’s heard by people through the doorbell’s speaker.

Installation

Installing the doorbell was refreshingly quick and easy. After drilling two holes in the wall next to my front door with the template, I screwed in the back plate, attached the optional angle mount, and prepared to mount the doorbell. If you can’t drill outside your front door, you can fix the doorbell to your wall with the provided adhesive pad – ideal for renters. I planned to put the doorbell through its paces with just batteries at first, so I didn’t initially attach the transformer I previously had set up for my Netatmo doorbell.

Next, I took the square speaker, which doubles as the repeater unit, inside the house and plugged it into a socket on the other side of the wall from the doorbell. Aqara recommends you keep the repeater within five meters of the doorbell, so my thickness-of-a-brick distance more than fulfilled that obligation.

The last part of the installation was done via the Aqara app, though you can use the Home app and skip Aqara’s altogether. The app took me through a few steps to connect the repeater to my home network.

I must reiterate how quick and easy this was. Once the holes were drilled, the rest of the process took around 20 minutes. The setup itself was straightforward and instructive.

After checking that the video angle was correct and adding the camera to the Home app, it was time to dive into the Aqara app, and oh boy, is that an experience, both good and bad.

The Aqara App

Let’s get this out of the way: the Aqara app is not pretty. Despite recent attempts to create a home tab that is reminiscent of Apple’s Home app, interactions are sometimes slow, and simple iOS gestures like swiping to go back are hit or miss in their implementations.

Finding settings for accessories is often like looking for a needle in a haystack. For instance, you want to know what the signal strength of the doorbell is? That’s in Device Settings, because Device Information would probably be too obvious, right? Once you get accustomed to the app’s… shall we say, “quirks”… there are lots of ways to customize how the doorbell performs for you.

I have Doorbell Chime enabled on my HomePods via the Home app so I can hear when someone rings the doorbell wherever I am in my house, which makes me appreciate that Aqara offers specific ring settings. You can turn off the chime or adjust the volume, and if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can upload an MP3 file to use as a custom chime. This might be helpful if you pop out to the shop or go away for the weekend. You could upload a short piece of audio telling a visitor you will be back in a minute or that they should leave any parcels with your neighbor. You can do this with the two-way audio feature as well, but we live in an age where Amazon drivers drop your package at the door, ring the doorbell, and then run off before you can even get to the door. This might help with that.

Face detection is nothing new, but having not used it with an Aqara product before, I was impressed. It’s not as good as HomeKit Secure Video, but it works well. Whereas HomeKit uses your entire photo library to recognize faces, I didn’t want to give the Aqara app that amount of access. Instead, what you can do is train the on-device system by naming faces it picks up; simply tap on an unknown face and name it. The system does a decent job of guessing who someone is after you’ve named them (especially since it’s only trained on a handful of images), though occasionally, you need to give it another training top-up. This functionality plays well with a feature called lingerer detection.

Lingerer detection is a feature that will alert you when someone the doorbell doesn’t recognize has been, well, lingering around your front door. You can refine the threshold for this based on the length of time and distance from the door, which is one area where the new mmWave sensor (metaphorically) shines. After my doorbell learned who my family and friends were, it alerted me a couple of times when someone was going through my family’s bins. We’ve had a few Amazon thefts in recent months, so I’m hoping this feature might catch who’s doing it and we can give the video to the police.

My only criticism of lingerer detection is that it has, on occasion, still considered someone a lingerer even after the doorbell is rung. Maybe Aqara could reduce these instances by allowing integration between a smart door sensor and the doorbell so that if your door is opened, the lingerer alert is canceled.

All of these different types of triggers and events have the potential to make for a nightmare when it comes to notifications. Thankfully, you can choose which kinds you would like to receive. I settled on turning all event notifications off except for lingerer alerts, and it’s been relatively peaceful so far.

There are several other features in the Aqara app that I won’t go into, like a tamper detection alarm and something called Integrated Events that you need Aqara’s subscription service for, but suffice it to say, the amount of customization is satisfyingly high.

Lastly, it’s worth going over the main video interface. When you open the camera view in the Aqara app, there are quick-action buttons to take a snapshot, start a recording, speak through the doorbell, and pause the streaming video. Below these buttons is a control panel with access to several areas of the app, like a live view of all your Aqara cameras, the albums of your recordings, and an event history timeline for all your Aqara devices. Below that, in the tab bar, there is a button called Playback that switches to a vertical timeline. If you have not set the doorbell to record continuously, which requires it to be hardwired, this looks very much like a HomeKit camera event timeline, only vertical.

If you do have your doorbell hardwired, the events appear as little notches on the timeline, and you can scrub up and down to find any recorded moment you wish. After a couple of weeks of flawless connectivity on battery power, I connected my doorbell to the transformer, leaving the batteries in place as a backup. Since then, I’ve been continuously recording to a 512GB microSD card, and the app has been pretty responsive with pulling footage from the card.

Is the G410 The Perfect Smart Video Doorbell?

In short, no. It isn’t. There’s always going to be room for improvement, especially while Aqara insists on sticking with its horrendous app design. What I will say is that the technology behind the G410 not only is solid but features several innovative ideas. Features like the mmWave sensor to improve detection and the concept of lingerer detection are both clever pieces of functionality that I haven’t seen elsewhere within the smart home marketplace.

When it comes to HomeKit integration, there’s not a lot to say, in a good way. The G410 does everything that Apple’s HomeKit API allows. It’s responsive when being viewed within the Home app, delivers ringing alerts to your devices quickly, and – thanks to the mmWave sensor – has triggered fewer recorded events in my camera timeline.

The Aqara Doorbell Camera Hub G410 Select is a dependable piece of smart home tech. It’s simple to set up and reasonably priced, it maintains a good connection with your smart home, and it allows for advanced customization if you so wish. It’s hard to ask for more from a video doorbell.

The Aqara Doorbell Camera Hub G410 Select is available to buy now for $129.99.