Review: Nanit Home Display Smart Baby-Monitor Companion

I’m a ’90s baby, so I grew up in the era of clunky, walkie-talkie baby monitors that crackled with static and whose volumes were turned by a dial. The system was simple: one unit in the nursery, one unit with the parents. Then technology evolved, and somewhere along the way, many baby monitors lost their parent units. Smart monitors like the Nanit (8/10, WIRED Recommends), which has been at the forefront of the market for years, shifted access to your phone and offered everything from crystal-clear video to sleep tracking, and sophisticated apps that turned your baby’s sleep into a data-rich experience.

Now, brands are reverting back. Nanit’s newest product, the Nanit Home, is a tablet-like screen that pairs with Nanit's Smart Baby Monitor ($289) and does (almost) everything the app does, freeing brand-loyal parents from their phones. After testing it with my daughter through late-night wakeups, the stomach flu, and overall toddlerisms, I found a monitor that’s undeniably helpful, only slightly held back by some quirks that, for many parents, might be worth overlooking.

Touch and Go

I’m a Nanit newbie, and the first thing that struck me when I opened and set up the product was how tall and skinny the floor-stand camera is. So much so that my first thought after assembling it was: “My daughter is absolutely going to knock this over.” But upon further inspection into the box, there was an anchor included that you can use to secure the stand to the wall. Once mounted, I did feel more at ease, but it didn’t seem like the hardware was really designed with a climbing toddler in mind.

The star of the show is the 8-inch touchscreen display that sits on your nightstand like a digital photo frame. The touchscreen itself feels slightly underpowered. It’s responsive enough for everyday use (tapping through the menu, adjusting brightness, etc.), but has a bit of the sluggishness you’d expect from an old iPhone. Typing during my account setup on the device felt cumbersome, and a glitch in the birthday selector kept bumping the selected date back one day. I had to intentionally choose the wrong date to get the correct one to register. Luckily, after this, I haven’t encountered any more bugs, but I still find that the touchscreen is sometimes uncooperative when I try to swipe up to unlock the screen.

Photograph: Nicole Kinning

The Home monitor can run wirelessly and charges via a USB-C cable. It relies on your Wi-Fi network to connect to the camera, so while you can carry the monitor around your home, you can’t take it fully “off-grid” or use it outside your home network. That’s not going to be a deal-breaker for most families, but it’s worth noting.

The flexibility does come with some limitations: The battery doesn’t last a full day, so if you’re using it off its charger, you’ll need to power it down when not in use to keep it alive. I found that most days, after I put my daughter down for her 10 am nap, the device, if left on and unplugged, would be nearly dead by bedtime around 7 pm.

Clarity Check

In most conditions, Nanit’s video quality is solid. My personal litmus test is whether I can see my daughter’s eyes in night mode, and from a standard view on the Home, the answer is yes. Zooming in brings out some pixelation, and the fixed floor-stand height means you can’t fine-tune the frame as much as you might like. But for a quick check-in glance parents make a dozen times a night, the clarity holds up.

The live feed is responsive with no noticeable delays or buffering, which I’ve found to be crucial in determining if certain sounds are cries or just sleep grunts. The display also shows room temperature and humidity levels, which is a nice touch as we dive headfirst into a Midwest winter.

The sound is clear as day. When set to do so, the Home monitor will ping when it detects crying or motion, and I have yet to miss any alerts while I sleep. The only hiccup came when I had the device lying flat on my desk; because the speaker sits on the back, the audio was noticeably muffled. Luckily, the built-in kickstand solves this, so it’s an easy problem to avoid.

Screen Time

On to the reason you’re all here—the touchscreen monitor. Its home screen is a mixture of widgets: the live feed, your baby’s status (when they were last attended to, how long they’ve been sleeping, etc.), a nightly summary, and environmental conditions (temperature and humidity). The interface of the live feed mimics the Nanit app pretty closely, with controls for the microphone, night-light, audio monitoring, breathing detection, and camera power sitting along the bottom of the live view.

Something worth noting: The screen is very bright. Even with the brightness turned all the way down in the settings, it was still bright enough to disrupt my sleep. Pressing the power button once enters standby mode—your audio stays on, and you’ll get sound and motion pings, but the screen stays dark. (Sometimes you need a second to prepare your eyes for a blast of blue light first thing in the morning.) There’s one catch: If you're on the livestream view, the screen won't go to sleep automatically and stays illuminated. On any other tab, it dims after 30 seconds to a screensaver displaying the time, date, and notifications, similar to a phone lock screen.

Photograph: Nicole Kinning

The Nanit Ecosystem

While the Home monitor is handy, the app is still essential for certain tasks. You can adjust most day-to-day settings on the Home device, but the Nanit app is where all the deeper features live.

The good news is that Nanit designed the Home to seamlessly fit into its existing ecosystem. You can buy the Home and camera as a bundle ($399) or pick up the Home on its own ($149), which is great news for any existing Nanit users who want a parent unit without replacing their camera. Families with multiple children will also appreciate the split-screen feature, which can support multiple cameras and display up to three screens at once. Core features like livestreaming, two-way audio, and temperature monitoring work across all cameras without paid plans (see below), but upgrading to sleep analytics features requires a subscription per child.

Speaking of subscriptions: This is where the Nanit system gets a little complicated. I’m on the Sleep Plan (free for the first few months), but if I had started using Nanit when my daughter was born, that trial would have expired and I’d be paying $100 a year to access video playback and other features. I’d sooner pay for an SD card than commit to another subscription. That reality hit a few weeks ago when the stomach flu tore through my house. On our old monitor, I could scrub through footage to pinpoint exactly when my daughter got sick in the middle of the night. With the Nanit Home, that feature sits behind a paywall. To add insult to injury, video history isn't even available on the Home display yet—Nanit says they're “putting the finishing touches on it.”