As you're undoubtedly aware, the Amazon Ring is a doorbell that houses a camera, speaker, and microphone, and its primary purpose is to enable you to see who is at the door before you answer it. Not only does it give you a heads-up of who is calling by streaming video to your phone or Alexa device, but it allows you to have a conversation with the caller, which is invaluable if you happen to be on the toilet "I'll be there in a minute!", or you wish to avoid the door-to-door salesperson or Jehovah's Witness "Sorry, I'm not in right now!", or, as you don't even need to be in the house to answer, for directing couriers where to leave the parcel.
• Don't miss today's best Black Friday camera deals
That may be a good enough reason on its own to invest in a Ring Doorbell, particularly as during the Black Friday sales, it's less than half price, dropping from £99.99 to just £39.99, but I'm going to give you a better one (it's directly below my roundup of the best Ring doorbell deals, but you can skip to the yarn by scrolling to the bottom). It hinges on the fact that not only do you not need to be in the house to answer the caller, or even in the same country, but every member of the household can be alerted when someone rings the doorbell.
Anyway, earlier this year, my 19-year-old son went traveling. It's something of a rite of passage for the kids in my neighborhood as they make their way to adulthood. Taking a gap year after finishing college, he'd worked hard in local restaurants to get enough cash together for a trip through Southeast Asia, to take some time to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Off he set to Bangkok with a bunch of his mates, and I was keen to hear about his adventures. But being a typical teen, his updates were brief, to say the least.
"How are you finding Thailand? I can't wait to hear what you've been up to!" I'd message. "Yeah, good," would come the WhatsApp response half a day later.
And so it went in the weeks that followed. "What are you doing today?" I'd ask. "In Cambodia" would be the two-word reply. "Oh wow! Have you been to the Angkor Wat temples? I'd love to see them, they're a photographer's dream!" I'd persevere. "Yeah, it's good," was as good as I was going to get.
Then, one day, I went to visit a friend. I rang his doorbell. His Ring doorbell…
"Dad!" the doorbell exclaimed. I was confused. My son went on to explain that he was in Vietnam and had met up with my friend's daughter when the Ring alert was triggered on her phone. The two are around the same age and have known each other since they were in nappies, and she was also on a gap year and on her own Asian adventure.
It was a little disconcerting, talking to a doorbell; he could see me, but I couldn't see him. But we had a good chat for half an hour about his travels, and I learnt a lot more about the sights he'd seen and scrapes he'd got into than I had in the previous two months of messaging.
And that is why I'm buying a Ring Doorbell in the Black Friday sales!
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