Reolink has officially launched the TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi, a high-performance security camera designed to eliminate blind spots, thanks to dual-lens technology and a 360-degree field of view.
Now available for $259.99 in the US, the hardwired device enters the market following a highly successful debut at IFA Berlin 2025, where it secured 19 “Best of IFA” awards for its innovative approach to home monitoring.
The TrackFlex features a dual-lens 4K system that provides two distinct views on a single screen. While the wide-angle lens captures an expansive panoramic view of a yard or driveway, the secondary 6x hybrid zoom lens automatically tracks and zooms in on moving subjects.
This “TrackMix” capability ensures users can see the full context of an event while simultaneously capturing fine details, such as faces or license plates, without the focus lag common in single-lens cameras.
Nighttime security is bolstered by 3000-lumen dimmable LEDs. These powerful floodlights provide vibrant full-color footage in total darkness and can be customized with adjustable color temperatures, ranging from a warm 3000K to a daylight-balanced 6500K.
To deter intruders, the camera is equipped with a 110-decibel siren and three passive infrared (PIR) sensors that enable 270-degree “Out-of-View” detection. If the sensors detect motion outside the camera’s current frame, the unit automatically rotates to capture the activity.
At the heart of the device is the ReoNeura AI system, which introduces local AI video search. Instead of manually scrubbing through hours of footage, users can simply type descriptions like “man in a red hat” or “white SUV” into the Reolink App to retrieve relevant clips instantly.
Critically, all AI processing and video storage happen locally on the device, ensuring user privacy and eliminating the need for monthly subscription fees.
As a nice digestif, we even had Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, which gave us a preview of the future of computing from the inside. The wild part is, all of those conferences and events don’t even cover all the gadgets we liked in September, so we made this list to make sure you got all of last month’s wild releases down.
Apple might not be the first of the big phone providers to go super-thin in a flagship phone (that distinction belongs to Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge), but this is still the first hyper-thin iPhone, and that’s a big deal. My colleague, Gizmodo’s Senior Editor of Consumer Tech, Raymond Wong, called it a “magic slab of glass,” and while I haven’t had a chance to use the phone in-depth myself, I did get to at least hold it, and I see the appeal.
It’s as thin and light as promised, and the fact that Apple managed to cram all of the compute power in the top portion of the phone and still deliver a serviceable battery life really is a feat of engineering. You don’t need an iPhone that’s this thin and light, but once you have one in you’re hand, you’re going to be tempted to buy one, even if the camera is barebones.
After trying Insta360’s new action camera out, we’re going to have to add swordplay to our list of usual tests. In case you missed it, Gizmodo Staff Writer Kyle Barr, tried out the Insta360 Go Ultra and, yes, it survived a blow from a sword, which is good news for anyone who’s bringing action cameras to a renaissance fair or to a reenactment of the movie Hook.
It’s not just durability; the Insta360 Go Ultra can record in 4K at 60 fps and comes with a magnetic mount that allows you to fix the camera in a lot of places, including square in the middle of your chest if you’re wearing a shirt while filming, which you probably should be. If you’re looking for a high-res, portable action camera that can survive sword attacks, this is worth a look.
After several long years, Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 got a real number update, and it was worth the wait. While the AirPods Pro 3 retain the same $250 starting price as the last generation, they get a few key upgrades, including better active noise cancellation, a redesigned fit, more ear tip sizes, and perhaps most importantly, two brand new capabilities: heart rate tracking and live translation.
Apple seems to be embarking on a new identity for its AirPods with health features in particular, and if you’re at all interested in keeping tabs on your biometrics, but don’t feel the need to strap an Apple Watch on your wrist, the AirPods Pro 3 could be the perfect gateway. AirPods Pro 3 are proof that you don’t need a generation update every single year—you just need one that feels worth the anticipation.
Would you buy a mouse that doesn’t click? Sounds like a trick question, but in the case of Logitech’s G Pro X2 Superstrike, that question is kind of literal. This mouse uses haptics to simulate clicking, which sounds like a gimmick, but is actually useful if you’re a competitive gamer. According to Logitech, the architecture of its G Pro X2 Superstrike mouse (Haptic Inductive Trigger System, for anyone interested) offers 30 milliseconds lower latency than a mouse with an optical switch, which uses a beam of infrared light to determine when you press the button.
Are you fast enough to even take advantage of technology like this? Probably not, but the fact that you could is impressive, and using haptics in a mouse instead of real-life clicks is objectively interesting if nothing else.
Sure, the iPhone Air may have stolen the show, but the base iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro/17 Pro Max versions also had a lot to like. We called the iPhone 17 base the “best iPhone value in years” thanks to its 120Hz always-on display, its great battery life, and its excellent performance, while the 17 Pros also held it down with the longest battery, the best performance, the best cameras, and a new “Cosmic Orange” model. Sure, the scratching didn’t help the fanfare, but you’re probably going to slap a case on these things anyway. If you’re in need of an iPhone upgrade, now may be the time.
What do I say about the Meta Ray-Ban Display? I’ve delved deeper and deeper into the burgeoning world of smart glasses over the last year, and Meta’s Ray-Ban Display (the company’s first pair of smart glasses with a screen in them) feels like the pair I’ve been waiting for.
They come with navigation abilities, message notifications, translation, a POV camera feature, and Instagram integration for watching Reels—and that’s on top of doing all the stuff that previous non-display smart glasses have done.
Sure, privacy problems abound, and they’re not quite a phone replacement yet, but based on my hands-on with them at Meta’s annual Connect conference, the Meta Ray-Ban Display are an exciting start and might just be the first pair of smart glasses you want to buy. Trust me, Meta’s Neural Band (a wristband that lets you control the smart glasses’ screen with your fingers) is just as magical as it sounds.
Wired security cameras might be a pain to set up, but they’re also superior in the fact that they have a higher likelihood of staying powered up—no battery and no climbing ladders to charge them when they die. The Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi security camera is no different and delivers fairly high-res 4K footage and doesn’t require a subscription. It’s got a huge 180-degree FOV, too. You will have to buy a microSD card to store your footage—there’s no cloud storage here—but the simplicity will likely appeal to some.
If the iPhone 17 is the best-value iPhone in years, the Apple Watch SE 3 may take the title for the smartwatch side of things. For $250, you get the proverbial “greatest hits” from the Apple Watch feature set, including an always-on display, an S10 chip, and even Apple’s “double-tap” gesture. There’s also 32 hours of battery life, which may not be enough for people who need the most out of an Apple Watch (that’s what the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is for), but should be plenty for most.
We would have liked to see some new colors here, but still, a good value is hard to beat, and that’s a note that the Apple Watch SE 3 hits perfectly in tune.
Reolink rolled out a new smart home security camera at IFA 2025 that the company says can see beyond its dual camera lenses. It’s called the TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi, and it looks kind of like the Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi, a camera I recently reviewed, but with a ball-shaped camera housing that rotates to see things that three sensors above them have detected.
This sensor-based approach gives the camera a 270-degree detection range at any given time, according to a press release that Reolink emailed to Gizmodo. The three motion sensors wrap around the front and sides of the unit. A representative I spoke with at Reolink’s IFA booth suggested installing the camera on the corner of your home, surveying a driveway that stretches from the street to a garage farther back, a scene impossible for one fixed-view camera to cover—the TrackFlex could detect that a car is entering the driveway, swivel to face it, then watch it as it drives to the garage.
Like other Reolink cameras, this one stores recordings locally, either with microSD cards (up to 512GB) or Reolink’s NVR and Home Hub devices. Saving videos to a network-attached storage (NAS) device via FTP is also an option. This is Reolink, so expect to be assaulted with options in the company’s app.
As for the TrackFlex’s dual cameras, they’re not recording one broad field of view like the Elite Floodlight WiFi. Instead, one is a standard wide view while the other is a 6x zoom, capable of capturing a lot more zoomed-in detail than the wide lens can. The two floodlights looked exactly like those of the Elite, and can articulate to point up or down, or to bathe a wider area in light. They also offer the same brightness and temperature adjustment as the Elite.
The camera uses the company’s new local AI system called ReoNeura Core, which enables the TrackFlex to do the same sorts of natural language video search that we’re seeing with a lot of other connected-camera AI systems. (See SwitchBot’s new AI Hub.) So, if you want to search your locally stored video for a moment, like when a person with a brown shirt walked into your garage last, you can do that. The Reolink rep I spoke with took me to a pair of displays that showed me what was happening behind the scenes.
On the left, it was a view of what a user might see while using the event notifications screen; you see the camera’s live feed. While on the right, a list of events with descriptions that were mostly pretty accurate—there were people interacting at a convention, and others were walking around in the background—but it got some details wrong. We weren’t at an outdoor event, for example (although it was quite bright in there).
Meanwhile, on the right, the screen showed individual characteristics of the things the model was identifying. Seeing everyone broken down by their attributes had a very police-station-surveillance vibe. ReoNeuro identified one person as a middle-aged male wearing a green, short-sleeve shirt, along with a hat and a bag. In the bottom panel, another middle-aged male—although that person definitely looked younger than me, and I’m still in my prime, I swear—is identified as wearing a long-sleeve shirt with pants, both blue, and as having short hair. All of that detail is effectively keywords for your searches later, and they all seem like things you’d type if you’re looking for specific events that you know the TrackFlex recorded.
But woof, it’s more than a little unnerving to see this in action, and it felt a little off-key to have a Reolink rep so proudly showing it to me. It’s great that this is all happening on device, as I’d rather that than have it happening in a cloud server over which I have no control. It’s convenient and there’s no doubt that I want the convenience of casually searching my footage, but that sure didn’t stop seeing how the sausage is made from giving me the willies.
Smart home cameras are just better when they’re wired. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass to install them, but if you can manage it, you’ll never have to change a battery or climb a ladder to get a camera down and charge it, or wait very long for its video feed to load in an app. If they’ve got a wired internet connection, all the better, but as Wi-Fi cameras with wired power go, the $220 Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi camera is one of the best.
The Elite Floodlight WiFi reminds me a lot of Google’s Nest Cam with floodlight, at least as looks are concerned, thanks to its curvy white plastic and two articulating floodlights with frosted white covers. One big difference is that the Elite Floodlight WiFi uses two separate camera sensors, their footage stitched together to form one long, 180-degree field of view.
Reolink Elite Floodlight Floodlight WiFi
Reolink’s Elite Floodlight WiFi is a easy to install wired camera with seemingly endless customization and no need for an internet connection.
Pros
Crisp, clear video
Tons of customizability
Local video
No subscription or internet connection required
Easy setup and installation
Stable, reliable Wi-Fi
Cons
No microSD card included
No cloud storage options
FTP storage requires managing
No wired internet connection
Limited smart home support
It also uses 5GHz Wi-Fi, which means it can transmit clearer, higher-bitrate video to your phone for its live feed and to your local FTP or real-time streaming protocol (RTSP) server, if you’ve got such a thing on your home network. If you don’t, not to worry: the camera also saves footage to an SD card that you can access from the Reolink app.
Initial setup involves powering the camera with an included USB-C cable, then downloading the Reolink app to your iOS or Android device and scanning a QR code on the Elite Floodlight WiFi. The app walks you through connecting to the camera and configuring its Wi-Fi setup—it uses 2.4GHz or 5GHz Wi-Fi 6—for a few minutes, then you’re ready to install the camera.
The camera’s app-guided installation is clear and straightforward, and very doable if you’ve set up cameras or floodlights before. It involves screwing a base plate onto the wall or soffit, hanging the camera from a hook on the plate, connecting it to your home using color-coded wires—ideally after you’ve shut off power to those wires so you don’t electrocute yourself!—and then screwing the camera onto the plate. All in all, I got the camera up and running within about 30 minutes.
After setup, I ran it through some paces and found that the Elite Floodlight WiFi consistently delivered motion notifications from the Reolink app within about four seconds. That’s way faster than any of the battery-powered cameras I currently have installed, including the Reolink Altas that I recently reviewed, which all frequently take 10 or more seconds to tell me they’ve spotted something or someone.
4K resolution never means you’re getting the kind of video quality you’d see in something like a decent smartphone camera, but the Elite Floodlight WiFi gets closer than most. Reolink bills it as a 4K camera, but you can ignore that as marketing speak—it records 5120 x 1,552 resolution video, which is not an apples-to-apples comparison to, say, a 4K monitor. Still, the image it shows you, even when streaming straight from the camera, is crisp enough to see details through the patio table in the screenshots above, day and night.
My backyard is always lit thanks to a bright street light next to my house, which makes it hard to tell much of a difference between the Elite Floodlight WiFi’s footage with and without infrared. That said, Reolink’s software brightens the dark area from the screenshots (below) enough that you could at least tell if a person is moving in that area. And the floodlights do a good job of lighting the space in front of the camera almost as well as daylight, although it can wash out details depending on where an object in view is, so you’ll want to be careful how you choose to angle them.
The Elite Floodlight WiFi is nice and sturdy, with an IP66 weather rating that should mean it’s safe from dust intrusion and jets of water. Two violent wind-and-rain storms pummeled it during my testing, and it’s no worse for the wear; the camera portion didn’t even seem to budge on its ball joint. It also reliably sent me notifications while I was away on a camping trip—mostly about a rabbit that took our absence as an opportunity to dig around in our garden for tasty vittles.
If you live somewhere with actual winter temperatures, you might pause on hitting the buy button—the Elite Floodlight WiFi is rated to operate up to as high as 131 degrees Fahrenheit, but only as low as 14 degrees. Incredibly—as I have learned (not first-hand, thankfully) since moving to the upper Midwest—break-ins still happen when the season is at its most treacherously cold.
No cloud subscription required—or available
Most of the big-name smart home cameras rely heavily on cloud services for their features, and in many cases that includes accessing your recordings. While some—but not all—offer local recording too, you may still need a subscription to access machine-learning-powered (or AI-powered, if you must) detection features that let you choose what actually triggers the camera’s notifications and recordings. That’s not the case with the Elite Floodlight WiFi, which handles all of that on-device, and isn’t covered under any of Reolink’s cloud subscription plans in the US.
That makes this camera a boon if you’re looking for a way to capture what’s happening around your home without shipping the footage off to some distant server you have no control over. Of course, you’ll want to at least put the Elite Floodlight WiFi on your home network if you want easy access to its recordings and live feed via the app, and it does need an internet connection for smartphone notifications.
As for storing the Elite Floodlight WiFi’s monitoring and recording, you’ve got options. The camera’s underside has a microSD card slot tucked behind a screwed-in panel that’s accessible in software using the Reolink app. You can configure the camera for exclusively events-based recording or for continuous recording, and there’s an option to encrypt its video files so that if someone happens by with a screwdriver and steals the card, they wouldn’t be able to view its recordings.
The Elite Floodlight WiFi also supports saving files to a computer or network-attached storage (NAS) via FTP, but you’ll need to consider storage space. The app can overwrite one file or alternatively overwrite between two files, but there’s no built-in mechanism for, say, overwriting the oldest file once your FTP server’s space has filled up. Instead, you’re left manually deleting files or hunting down scripts that can automate the process for you.
Setting the Elite Floodlight WiFi up to use RTSP requires using a PC or Mac; you can’t configure with the smartphone app. Still, that’s better than the Altas, which requires you to buy a $99 Reolink Home Hub to get RTSP operational.
While it’s nice that this camera is so useful without a cloud storage service, there are conveniences you’ll miss out on, like having a professional monitoring service that can contact the police on your behalf or even employ call center reps to try to ward off would-be intruders by talking through your camera to them. And although you can remotely access recordings saved to a microSD card inserted into the Elite Floodlight WiFi, that won’t work if your home internet happens to have gone down when you try to look. Then again, you also don’t necessarily have to worry about the camera volunteering your recordings for unpleasant police state-style surveillance, either.
The Reolink app is about as user-friendly as security camera software gets, with a main screen that shows you its live feed, complete with current bitrate and buttons for things like turning on the floodlight or manually recording a clip.
Go into the Elite Floodlight WiFi’s settings, and you’re treated to a staggering number of options. Like its battery-powered Altas sibling, the camera allows you to customize seemingly every aspect of its detection and recording, from the resolution of the videos to when you’d like it to record, alert, or notify you—and what triggers each of those things to happen. Video too bright or dim? You can tweak that. Think the floodlight is too intense or overly cool? The app has brightness and warmth sliders, too. You can even record your own custom audio for the siren, which is a very fun feature that I wish every piece of smart home tech that makes any noise had. The siren isn’t especially loud, but anyone in the Elite Floodlight WiFi’s field of view should be able to hear it.
With such a wide camera feed, it’s hard not to point the Elite Floodlight WiFi outside of the area you actually want to record, something Reolink handles with a feature it calls Smart Event Detection Zones. With it, you can set the camera to record or blare its siren only when someone crosses a virtual line, enters an area you’ve defined, or even loiters in a region of the camera’s view for longer than an amount of time you determine. And if you want to be a good, privacy-respecting neighbor, you can exclude specific areas from recording or even black out portions of the feed.
At the risk of making the Elite Floodlight WiFi sound like a person trying to describe their greatest weakness in a job interview, Reolink almost offers too many options. The menu system feels a little convoluted—some of the options, like for the floodlight, should all be in one place, yet they aren’t—and it’s hard to remember where everything is, but easy to make a change that has an unintended consequence. I wouldn’t give up any of the options, but they stand to be better organized.
Also, if you’re hoping to connect the Elite Floodlight WiFi to the smart home system of your choice, prepare to be disappointed. This camera only connects to Google Home, which is a shame if you, like me, are already too deeply invested in a different ecosystem to turn back. Still, Reolink offers a robust enough set of features in its own app that I only sometimes missed having all my camera feeds in one app.
Worth it if you’re tired of the cloud
The Reolink Elite Floodlight Camera is a great, reliable way to cover a huge region of your home’s yard or the area around a business. Its onboard object recognition, speedy delivery of notifications, fast Wi-Fi connection, and deep well of customization combine with its cloud subscription-free and internet-not-required operation to be one of the best wired security cameras you can buy today.
Those who like the convenience of cloud storage may not find everything they want here, but they also might want to try anyway. Yes, it’s pricier, at $219.99, than similar floodlight alternatives offered by Arlo and Ring, but considering the ever-increasing price of those companies’ subscriptions, it may not be long before you make up the difference. Plus, with local storage via a microSD card that’s accessible even away from home, you may find that the experience of using it is nearly identical to that of more well-known brands, minus some of the trappings of cloud-based AI features or remote monitoring.
