LeapFrog Advanced Baby Monitor review

13 March 2009 9:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Babies are great aren't they, all oohs and ahhs, those cute little things. That is until you want to go downstairs and watch a movie. LeapFrog believes it has the answer no matter what the size of your house with the new Advanced Baby Monitor. But is it any good? We left our little one to find out.

For the most part a baby monitor is a baby monitor isn't it? I mean it lets you leave your child in a room, listen in on them and therefore be somewhere else without the worry that they are screaming or causing havoc.

Here the biggest selling point of the LeapFrog Advanced Baby Monitor is that is has a range of 60m in your house and 600m on open terrain.

The 60m means it will happily cover most of your mansion, and in our test this was clearly the case. We haven't got a massive home, but it was certainly good enough to work in every room. But where the benefit of that extra range comes in is when you step into your garden or, if you are feeling brave, over to your neighbours for a spot of tea.

Again in our tests we had no issue in hearing what was said as we happily strolled down to the bottom of the garden. Wanting to see how far the technology would allow us to run away we started walking down the street. The results were psychologically off-putting but that wasn't because the technology didn't work - far from it. We got a little too far away from our home for our liking.

So range is good, what about features? Well the set comes with a circular base station and pastel green remote unit for you to clip to your belt or carry around with you. The base station is simple in its design, a little cheap looking in fact, but comes with a night light, lullaby feature and temperature gauge.

Linking the remote unit to the base station gives you the ability to control that light, the lullabies, read the temperature in the room and even go as far as talking to the baby via a push to talk button.

The remote also allows you to set temperature ranges complete with alarms if the room gets too hot or too cold and like the base station is simple to use if not a little cheap looking.

If that wasn't enough for the avid gadget fan the remote unit also comes with a torch (for some reason) and there is also a feed timer and multi-language support for your au pair (an excuse to get one if ever I heard it).

LeapFrog who is normally very good on the build quality of its products has let the side down here and compared to baby monitor offerings from Tomy or Philips it's a distance apart.

Verdict

The bottom line is that the system works, allowing you a bit more freedom than you have perhaps been enjoying. The remote control functions are useful, as it allows you to calm your baby without actually getting off your arse and the range means you might just be able to get to the local pub and still hear what's going on (although we wouldn't recommend that route).

So what's letting it down? Well compared to the competition the build quality isn't that great. These things get thrown around, put in travel bags, picked up by the kids and we just aren't sure that the LeapFrog Advanced Baby Monitor would be up to the job over the long haul.

Score

Review Recap

Made by: LeapFrog
Price as reviewed: £79.99
The good: Range, features
The bad: Build quality
Quick verdict: The bottom line is that the system works, allowing you a bit more freedom than you have perhaps been enjoying, it's just a shame about the build quality
Score