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Zoom for Home devices give you a second screen just for video calls

 

Zoom, the videoconference company that has become synonymous with our new pandemic-oriented way of conducting meetings from home, has announced its first hardware and software products, known as Zoom for Home.

Zoom for Home
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Created in collaboration with third-party device manufacturers, the first of these products is the $599 DTEN Me, a 27-inch touchscreen video panel that has three built-in wide-angle cameras and an eight-microphone array. It’s a fully self-contained videoconference device with its own Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections. Pre-orders for the DTEN Me are open now, and it is expected to ship in August 2020.

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“After experiencing remote work ourselves for the past several months,” Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan said in a press release, “it was clear that we needed to innovate a new category dedicated to remote workers.”

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As the name suggests, Zoom for Home is intended to provide those who work from home with an affordable way to stay connected to their colleagues, without having to cram a Zoom meeting window into the limited screen real estate offered by the average laptop.

And though the DTEN Me might look like a 27-inch external computer monitor, with a limited resolution of 1080p, it’s clearly been designed as a video tool, not an extension of a user’s computer desktop, although with an HDMI input, it can certainly be used for this too.

The screen’s three cameras — which use a variety of angles —  give it a huge 160-degree field of view, which DTEN claims is good for a room of up to 16 x 16 feet — which ought to be more than enough coverage for the average home office or even a living room.

As a touchscreen device, you can also take advantage of the Zoom software’s built-in whiteboarding feature.

The device is compatible with any level of Zoom account — even the free basic tier — and can connect to any existing video system that uses Zoom’s Zoom Rooms software, the company’s $50 per month, per room enterprise videoconference product.

It’s tempting to compare the DTEN Me to other video chat-capable devices like the 10-inch $230 Nest Hub Max, 10-inch $180 Facebook Portal, or the 10-inch, $180 Amazon Echo Show. However, as affordable as these camera-equipped smart displays are, they’re strictly intended for person-to-person two-way video calling and don’t possess the necessary screen size to do multi-participant meetings, which has become Zoom’s killer feature as people have struggled to make working from home workable.

Simon Cohen
Simon Cohen is a contributing editor to Digital Trends' Audio/Video section, where he obsesses over the latest wireless…
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