Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The camera is phenomenal. Extremely clear at night and in full sun. I just wish the rest of the experience was as good. I purchased this bundle because after reading reviews on the SD card it seemed that Black Vue stressed that their card is so much better that it's worth the premium given the strain on the card. If only that were true. TL;DR, SD card is a 50/50 chance of a lemon and an expensive one at that, I think I'll switch to SanDisk instead. If you want to RMA, hope you don't have any PII on your SD card as you'll have to turn it in to get a replacement. App is workable, but only after doing hours of digging online to do a workaround. You would think BlackVue would list in their manual or even fix their programming so it's not a problem to start. SD Card: I received the bundle on July 20th and installed it that weekend. It worked fine for two weeks. I followed the instructions for reformatting the card every week, but it seems that it never actually did it because I have random files on the card from the 21st so I can only surmise I was given a defective card from the start and the bad sectors on it eventually grew to make the whole card useless. There was no notification that the card had fried during the 2nd week. It was only when I was reviewing the videos that weekend that I noticed the last file was 8/11 and it was corrupted and not able to be played. Had I been in an accident, I'd be SOL because the camera makes the trigger and starts the recording, but no file is actually saved and no notification of it failing is shown. For instance, several triggered events on the 10th, potholes mostly, yielded no files either. I tried to reformat again on the camera, it said it did it, but that was not the case as the card still had the files on it. So I tried to do it on the computer and I kept getting a disk is write protected error. It seems that when a microSD card is close to failing, it goes into write protection mode to prevent the loss of the data on the card. While that's nice, the problem is I paid about a $100 premium for this card and now I cannot use it after just 2.5 weeks. I contacted the seller and the manufacturer about it, they offered a link to try other means to reformat the card, methods I had already tried on my own to no avail, the card was definitely useless. So here comes the RMA.. RMA process: The problem with a camera that records all the time is that when it fails it will undoubtedly have PII (personally identifiable information) on the SD card. Because the card goes into write protection mode, means you will not be able to reformat, delete, or securely wipe the card. BlackVue requires you to return the SDcard to get a replacement under their warranty when instead they should provide a means for you to prove the card is fried so as to not have to send in a card with PII on it. The moment that card leaves your possession, anyone can copy the data off of it. It could have the locations of where you frequent, your children, your spouse, your house, etc. Because of such a draconian policy in 2018, this gets very poor marks from me. They would not even budge when I consulted the manufacturer directly. Several other companies which I have unfortunately needed to do RMAs did not require the return of the defective unit, just a video of proof that the unit had failed was sufficient or in some cases just my word was enough. So learn from my experience, either delete the files on your card after every use or be prepared to absorb the loss if you don't want to share your PII with the world. Either way, it was poor form to overcharge for a useless SD card and then require it to be sent with all data to get a replacement. Android users: This platform is based nearly 100% on Apple devices, something they did not really make clear which is interesting considering it's from South Korea where I would think they would put a lot of stock in Samsung and thus Android or at least an equal share. The android functionality of the app seems to be an afterthought. It took a lot of digging when I first hooked it up as to why I could not for the life of me connect to the damn wifi on the camera. Here in lies the crux of the poor programming of the app. Apple devices can use wifi and data simultaneously. That's one of their selling points and one that I wish Android could do too. The problem lies with when an Android device is connected to a wifi that has no internet, like BlackVue's camera, it will switch from that wifi whenever a request is made for data and instead switch to your mobile data. With this app, however, this will cause you to continually disconnect from the camera's wifi unless you disable mobile data. If the app notices you are disconnected from the wifi, it'll immediately kick you out to the main menu. So if I want to connect to the camera via Direct Wifi, I must disable my mobile data to ensure that after 3-5 seconds I don't drop the connection to BlackVue. This also means that because Android cannot pull data simultaneously, you cannot see the map view. While that's not a big problem for me, I could see how that could be a problem for someone using a bunch of cameras for fleet tracking. I've used other apps that had map functionality and communicated via wifi on Android before and never had the problem where the app would completely disconnect from the wifi if mobile data was running. The app would download relevant data from the mobile connection and keep the connection to the wifi. My three year old 3DR Solo drone is a perfect example of this so it's nothing new or revolutionary it just seems that BlackVue did not want to spend the time on the Android app as they spent on the Apple app. Another annoyance with the app is that you cannot delete files through the app so unless you want to pull the SD card and delete them on your computer or just reformat it, there is no easy way to selectively delete a file. I don't know if that's a shortcoming on the Android version or if it's the same for Apple too but that just seems very short-sided. GoPro lets you delete files off the camera on the app, my Nikon with wifi lets me do it too...what gives BlackVue?