The best way to connect with your loved ones this Christmas

How to be with the ones you love from anywhere in the world

Christmas is a time for sharing and caring, for loving and giving and for being with the people you love the most. But sometimes work or life gets in the way and you can’t actually share the same roaring fire as everybody else. But there’s a solution to that. Whether you’re travelling, working, or orbiting the Earth this Christmas, the Canary can keep you connected to the ones you love. You can even use it to keep an eye out for Santa Claus.

A clever Canary

You might already know about Canary as an exciting piece of smart home kit. It’s a connected home camera with serious specs - despite its modest size it’s full HD, has a 147-degree wide angle lens, offers great sound quality, has a night vision mode and comes packed with sensors to monitor temperature, humidity and air quality - and it’s a great way to get close to the people you care about. Simply swipe the iPhone or Android app - or call it up on your iPad, Android tablet or Apple TV - and your loved ones are right there in high definition. It’s the next best thing to being there.

The Canary isn’t just for Christmas, though. It automatically starts recording when it detects motion, so it’s a fantastic way to keep an eye on your pets, delivering real-time video with a swipe of your finger. It’s great for parents of young children too, enabling you to connect when you’re at work or travelling so you don’t miss those first steps. And with its free cloud storage keeping the last 24 hours of video, it’s a great way to capture the things you might otherwise miss: your dog doing something daft, perhaps, or the kids doing something hilarious. It enables you to capture moments and make memories. Don’t just take our word for it. You can see the things other Canary users have captured on YouTube, whether that’s the secret life of pets or baby’s first steps. And you needn’t worry about Canary recording you when you’re at home: the built-in privacy settings mean you can shut down the camera and microphone at any time. Your personal data is stored securely too.

You can even use the Canary to spot Santa Claus. Just put milk and cookies where your Canary can see them and Canary HQ will monitor your room for any signs of Saint Nick. All you need to do to activate Santa Mode is email a clip of your milk and cookies along with your Twitter handle to santamode@canary.is. You’ll want to hurry though, because the closing date for entries is Christmas Eve.

Safe as houses

The Canary isn’t just a great part of your life when you’re catching up with the kids or keeping an eye on your pets, though. It also protects your home when you’re out and about. It automatically detects you coming or going so you don’t need to mess about with keypads or other controllers to switch modes, and if the house is empty it becomes a seriously clever security system. Night vision means it can see in the dark, a 90-decibel siren is going to ruin any intruder’s day or night and it even knows how to contact the emergency services: it imports contact details for police, fire and emergency services appropriate for where you live, giving you one-touch access to those services no matter where you are in the world. And because it’s recording all the time, you’ll have video evidence too - as this unlucky burglar discovered when he made the mistake of breaking into a Canary owner’s home. That isn’t just useful after the event. If the police know you’ve got evidence documenting a break-in that’s still occurring, they’re going to come rushing to intercept the intruder.

The Canary won’t just monitor your home for human intruders. It can also monitor the home environment to let you know if it’s too hot, too cold, too humid or if there’s an issue with the air quality thanks to its HomeHealth system. That’s really helpful if you’re trying to identify what’s triggering particular health issues or if you want to track air quality over a period of time.

Canary’s technology is coming to the outdoors too. The Canary Flex, which is currently launching in the US but not available for pre-order in the UK just yet, brings everything that’s great about the Canary and makes it not just wireless, but weatherproof too.

A great gift

If you’re thinking that the Canary would be a great gift for a techy friend, you’d be right - and you won’t be giving them a device that’ll annoy them by being hard to set up or fussy about where it’s put. The Canary fits happily wherever you want it to go, setup couldn’t be simpler and unlike some connected home products, it’s good looking too. Some smart home kits are best hidden, but the Canary looks just right in any part of your home. And if you order between the 18th and 31st of December, you’ll get a whopping £20 off the price.

There are lots of smart home devices competing for a place in your home, but with its smarter technology, superior design, HomeHealth monitoring and real security nothing comes close to a Canary. To find out more, meetCanary.co.uk

T3 Online

T3.com is one of the UK's leading consumer lifestyle websites, visited by over 10 million people every month. You can follow us on TwitterFacebook and Instagram. We present products in helpful buying guides and carefully curated deals posts across style, living, auto, smart home, watches, travel, fitness and more. We also have a monthly magazine which you can buy in newsagents or subscribe to online – print and digital versions available.