NEW - Ring Battery Doorbell Pro (2024 release)

UPDATE: After replacing the dead battery in the doorbell with a new one (probably didn't need to replace it, just recharge it) a few weeks ago, the new battery held a 100% charge for two weeks. Then it dropped to 90%, fell a little more, and is now holding (for the last two weeks) up & down around 90%. The "lightning bolt" battery symbol and "hardwired" tag in the app tells me it's connected to its powered transformer (no telemetry regarding volage or current). A week+ ago I turned OFF the periodic (was hourly) snapshot capture after reading other's experience about that extending battery life but I don't know if that makes a significant difference. For now I'm just monitoring it to see if it holds at 90% +/-, trickle-charging enough to keep the battery charged at that level. Or, if as with the original battery, it drops to 2% then zero without warning or alert. If the latter, since it's installed at an aging family member's home, and that person doesn't have the skill or capability to undo screws, pull off panels, remove & reinsert batteries, USB charge them, etc., I'll replace the Ring Bell + Chime + yearly-subscription with a better replacement brand I've already identified. ===================== I've had the Ring Doorbell Pro for 7-months at the time I wrote this review. If you had asked me a couple of months I probably would have given the product 4-stars, but the experience in the last week made that plummet. The Ring Doorbell Pro includes a battery, but is also "hardwired" (trickle-charged) from the already-present transformer that powers the wired doorbell. After working OK for over half a year, the end user called me to tell me the Ring Doorbell was "offline". No video, no audio, no LEDs, no custom Ring Chime tones, etc. The wired doorbell continued to "ding dong" when the Ring button was pressed and the Ring Chime still emitted a single "dong" (showing that the Ring had at least minimal power from somewhere and was able to transmit something). A check of its logs showed that a couple of days prior the battery had dropped to 2% after which I assume the battery had died and the Ring turned off. Thinking that the rechargeable battery had died (after only 7-months of modest use!?), I ordered a new battery and USB-charged it, in preparation for a trip to the user's home to replace the battery. After I got there, I swapped the manually-charged battery for the dead one and the unit immediately came up, reconnected to WiFi and worked fine. I then put the old battery on a USB-charger and, to my surprise, it started charging and seems to have charged up fully over the next couple of hours. After this I did some investigation and found that the Ring spontaneously ceasing to charge its battery at all was a common and well-complained-about problem, on Ring's own support forum, going back at least 5-yrs. The solution is to remove the battery and USB-charge it--until it happens again. Ring is happy to provide excuses -- your trickle charger isn't able to provide enough power to recharge the battery quickly after a heavy session (video, audio, etc.); it's too hot or too cold, weak WiFi, your house is haunted, whatever... But I've never seen the battery drop below 100% even when the unit had modest use (video, audio, LEDs, etc.), with the transformer providing sufficient charge to always keep the battery fully charged up. The transformer continued to power the wired chime even after the Ring died, activating when the Ring button was pressed. After the battery suddenly stopped charging and drained to zero, the Ring & wired transformer was unable to recharge the battery even a little after several days of non-use. I'm pretty confident that the problem is Ring's firmware or hardware, along with the fact that Ring doesn't know how or care enough to fix it. If you're using the unit at your own home and don't mind swapping or charging batteries when the unit decides to no longer charge [pretend it's not 'hardwired'], just 'cuz, you may be OK with this behavior. But if you want want it for remote monitoring at 'grandma's house' or at a rental property or any other remote location where you don't have easy access or don't want to deal with complaining tenants, I'd advise you to buy something else. Even for you own home, you may decide that you really want the claimed *hardwired*--not-battery-powered doorbell, and may prefer a competitor's product rather than Ring's nonsense. I already posted a 1-star review of Ring Chime Pro, a product no better than the Ring Doorbell itself.