It was very difficult to get useful information on the A129's connectivity options and configuration prior to purchasing one.
I bought one, and was stunned to figure out how its implemented.
There is no Bluetooth, which would is how electronics have connected around the world for a long time now. My A129, appears to only have WiFi and for some strange reason, its implemented in Station Mode, meaning the A129 "cannot" connect to hotspots or WiFi that almost everyone has now, lots of new cars come with a WiFi AP in the car to connect to the Internet from your tablet/phone/laptop. This really seems like the developers were not up to speed with respect to industry norms.
What Viofo has done is made the A129 an Access Point. So you configure your phone to connect to it as an access point, not something with access to the internet that you usually want/need. I have not seen any WiFi implementations on a phone/Tablet/Laptop that allow more than one WiFi connection at a time so you could access the Dashcam and the internet at the same time allowing uploading your video to something in the cloud without re-configuring you device again. I know my phone and laptops (Apple) have almost no extra storage on board due to Apples exorbitant storage cost model.
Having been a network engineer for a huge multinational for the last 25 years I have an idea how this should/could have been implemented. Our devices would have implemented Bluetooth to allow device configuration from you phone or laptops. Probably also using the same for downloading of the videos. We would have configured WiFi so you could connect to an access point with Internet Access. Which would also allow a DVR to use RTSP to record video to a larger storage device. 256GB seems pretty small on the non Pro version I have, I wonder how many hours of 4K video could be stored before it gets over written on the Pro version.
I bought one, and was stunned to figure out how its implemented.
There is no Bluetooth, which would is how electronics have connected around the world for a long time now. My A129, appears to only have WiFi and for some strange reason, its implemented in Station Mode, meaning the A129 "cannot" connect to hotspots or WiFi that almost everyone has now, lots of new cars come with a WiFi AP in the car to connect to the Internet from your tablet/phone/laptop. This really seems like the developers were not up to speed with respect to industry norms.
What Viofo has done is made the A129 an Access Point. So you configure your phone to connect to it as an access point, not something with access to the internet that you usually want/need. I have not seen any WiFi implementations on a phone/Tablet/Laptop that allow more than one WiFi connection at a time so you could access the Dashcam and the internet at the same time allowing uploading your video to something in the cloud without re-configuring you device again. I know my phone and laptops (Apple) have almost no extra storage on board due to Apples exorbitant storage cost model.
Having been a network engineer for a huge multinational for the last 25 years I have an idea how this should/could have been implemented. Our devices would have implemented Bluetooth to allow device configuration from you phone or laptops. Probably also using the same for downloading of the videos. We would have configured WiFi so you could connect to an access point with Internet Access. Which would also allow a DVR to use RTSP to record video to a larger storage device. 256GB seems pretty small on the non Pro version I have, I wonder how many hours of 4K video could be stored before it gets over written on the Pro version.