Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a definite improvement over the regular Pokemon Go Plus, but there are still improvements that could be made. How to get the most from the Gotcha: 1. Set auto-catch duplicate Pokemon, auto-catch new Pokemon, and auto-collect from Pokestops/Gyms all to ON. 2. Vibration setting is up to you, but after getting a sense for how often it grabs things you probably want to turn the vibration off. It vibrates multiple times for each interaction, and I still can't figure out what each of the vibrations are supposed to mean. 3. Open the Settings menu from within the game, tap the Pokemon Go Plus item. This opens the Pokemon Go Plus specific settings. - If you have lots of Pokeballs and want to catch all Pokemon & spin all Pokestops that you can: Leave both Nearby Pokemon and Nearby Pokestop notifications checked. - If you are low on Pokeballs and want the Gotcha to focus on restocking: Turn OFF Nearby Pokemon notification, leave Nearby Pokestop turned on. This will prevent the Gotcha from seeing ANY pokemon spawns (new or duplicate) and it will only restock items. This is the only way to restock items faster than the Gotcha catches Pokemon short of sitting on top a pokestop for a long time and letting it auto-spin every 5 minutes. Pros: 1. Allows you to automatically catch pokemon and spin gyms/pokestops at times when you (hopefully) wouldn't be able to use your phone, such as while driving, at work, etc. This is is something the standard Pokemon Go Plus doesn't do. On the standard one you have to manually click it at each vibration to catch/spin, meaning you miss out on a lot more pokemon/stops/gyms. 2. Only uses your standard Pokeballs, meaning it will never waste your upgraded balls. Once you run out of standard balls it will stop attempting to catch any Pokemon it sees. It will still detect them, which can cause it to miss noticing and spinning pokestops, so make sure you turn off the Nearby Pokemon notification within the Pokemon Go Plus game settings until you're sufficiently restocked. 3. Catches pokemon and spins pokestops/gym signs faster than you'd be able to manually. 4. Can catch pokemon/spin stops/gyms while you're in-game busy doing something else (such as battling a raid). This can help maximize lucky egg experience gains. 5. Has a surprisingly high catch rate considering how it's not getting curveball, nice/great/excellent throws, berries, or upgraded pokeball bonuses. Seems to have around a 60% catch rate. Considering how most of the pokemon it catches are ones you wouldn't have even seen (because you're busy driving) or wouldn't have had time to catch (as a passenger in a moving car, you can't catch everything on-screen before moving out of range), that's a pretty fair improvement. 6. Surprisingly light on battery usage! My phone doesn't have the huge drain that it does when I have the phone app open and interacting with the game, and the Gotcha seems to have reasonable battery life itself. I haven't managed to totally drain it yet while using it all day and charging at night. My phone's batter drains very slightly faster than it normally does when I have it locked and idle during a day at work, but that's to be expected. Cons: 1. The instructions are not very clear. After using this for a day I think I've finally gotten the hang of it and figured out all it's quirks, but it definitely wasn't intuitive and required bookmarking the instructions site to remember what the various icons meant. There's also zero explanation of what the various vibrations are supposed to mean. 2. While this seems to be able to catch Pokemon when you're going faster than the game-imposed 15mph speed limit, the same cannot be said of Pokestop/PokeGym spins. This means you tend to burn through balls pretty quickly compared to how many items you can restock. I can only leave it auto-catching for a day or so before I need to turn it back to Pokestops/Gyms only so I can restock. 3. No way to configure priority between catching pokemon and pokestop spins. Ideally, the priority would be Catch New Pokemon, Spin Pokestops/Gyms, Catch Duplicate Pokemon, but in reality it seems that pokestops/gyms are the lowest priority. Since there's usually a bunch of pokemon near gyms/stops, you have to be stopped completely or moving REALLY slowly to let it get through all the catches before collecting items. 4. If you have vibrations turned on while everything's set to auto-catch/auto-collect, there's no way to tell from vibrations or vibration patterns alone what you're being notified of. Everything is a giant mass of buzzes, whether it's detecting and catching a pokemon, detecting and losing a pokemon, or a pokestop spin. 5. The on-screen icons signifying what the vibration notification was for only stay on screen for a brief moment when auto-catch/auto-spin are on. If you're not looking at it when it's up, chances are you've missed seeing what happened. This makes sense when it's showing a long string of actions that happened all at once, but if it's a lone event while you're at your desk it seems like it should be able to display long enough for you to turn your wrist to look. 6. Simply turning off auto-catch on the Gotcha does NOT mean it will spin pokestops and ignore pokemon. It means that it will wait for a response from you for every Pokemon it detects, and will ignore everything else until that detected Pokemon is out of range. There is zero multi-tasking implemented where it will do the other auto-do things while waiting for a response from you, which is possibly a limitation on the PoGo Plus API's side. This was not intuitive at all and took some experimentation to figure out. See "How to get the most out of your Gotcha" section above in this review for how to best configure things for restocking. 7. There's really no way to let the Gotcha auto-catch new Pokemon only and ignore all duplicate Pokemon. Not sure if this is due to the PoGo Plus API or bad coding on the Gotcha. As mentioned earlier, turning off auto-catch duplicate Pokemon and leaving on auto-catch new Pokemon isn't useful, as it will only auto-catch the new pokemon if the new pokemon is the first pokemon it detects. Suggested changes: 1. Either change the priority to (highest to lowest) Catch New Pokemon, Spin Pokestops/Gyms, Catch Duplicate Pokemon or allow us to configure the priority. 2. Get someone who actually knows how to write an instruction manual and update the instructions... 3. Streamline the vibrations so they're easier to understand. Ideally I'd want to be able to tell by feel whether it was a pokemon interaction or a pokestop interaction that just happened. Maybe a single short buzz for a pokemon interaction (regardless of if it was caught or fled) and a long buzz for a pokestop interaction. Without this, I have no idea if the pokestop I just drove by got spun unless I have the phone open and am looking at it, which defeats the purpose. Best I can figure, right now it buzzes 3 times when it detects a pokemon, and then more vibrations when it catches or flees, so it all melds together in an incomprehensible mass of buzzes. 4. If possible, add multi-tasking... If auto-catch is turned off for duplicate pokemon, the last thing I want is for the Gotcha to sit and wait for a response on one pokemon and miss auto-spinning a pokestop or catching a new pokemon. In it's current state there's virtually no use cases for turning the auto-catch/auto-spin features off since it's a total degradation of performance. One other thing to note is that if you're sitting at your desk at work the game seems to lose its connection to the Gotcha after some time, meaning you have to open your phone and re-pair the two. I'm not sure if this is the Gotcha's fault or if it's a normal limitation of the Pokemon Go Plus API, so I didn't include it in the cons list or count it against the star rating. It's mostly a minor annoyance at most. I also second what previous reviewers said about how you probably want the vibration notifications turned off when you have auto-catch running. As mentioned, you can't really tell what's going on from the vibrations, and they are rather prolific. I left it on for the first day to get an idea of how it's working and how often it's doing things, but I can see the vibrations getting obnoxious unless you're doing the manual catch option.