Garmin Dash Cam Mini 2, Tiny Size, 1080p and 140-degree FOV, Monitor Your Vehicle While Away w/New Connected Features, Voice Control - 010-02504-00

The compact size is great and non-obtrusive*. I don't need a screen of my driving on or a large block in my site line. I only want a camera in case of an incident. This fit the bill. I bought 2 of these, the first was for a '20 Mustang without all the Safety sensors and nanny systems tied into the rear view mirror. I liked that it was compact and I put it on the passenger side behind the mirror. More recently, I bought a new Jeep GC 4xe with all the nanny systems. I already had an EZPass tucked on the passenger side with all the sensors spreading into the passenger side, there was no room to tuck the camera like I did on the Mustang. So, I put this latest Mini 2 on the diver's side, using a hard wired Donger USB port (highly recommend) on the driver side. Several issues I have. First is the red light* at night. There is a steady red light indicator that is too bright. I thought I did a good job putting the camera behind the mirror, but I did not account for the little red LED causes a glare, looking like a brake light in my peripheral vision. I had to move the mirror out of my comfort zone to block it. You can tell me to readjust or move the camera but it's a lot of work. Why? Because the next issue is with wireless Apple Car Play. It is not easy to set up with Apple Car Play being wireless because the Bluetooth on my iPhone 13 is a slave to the Car Play. You have to un-pair from Car Play completely to set up your Garmin view, then re-pair with the Car Play (no issue with the hard wired Car Play version in the Stang). So the issue is the Garmin app and wireless Car Play cannot co-exist; you will not get a "live view" if connected to wireless Car Play- you will need to disconnect your phone from your car to get the live view. The camera's WiFi shows up on the phone, it just doesn't give the video feed. Not sure if I will keep this one for the Jeep. So be aware of the bright little tiny light and Apple Car Play.

I wanted a dashcam which was inconspicuous. This Garmin product (mini 2) solves that issue. The camera is approximately the size is a larger key fob. I chose to place the camera in the lower center of my windshield. This placement did require a simple splice between the longer power cable (upward type c USB) and the shorter power cable (downward facing type c USB) (a 10 minute fix). I installed this camera in four vehicles. I suggest using the Garmin OBD adapter. Other than 2 inches at the camera there are no exposed wires at all. The camera turns on when the vehicle is started and turns off when your turn the vehicle off. Simply fire and forget. Nice automatic video saving in the event of an accident as well as simply audio commands, which work well. The video is 1080 not 4K, thus I gave 4 stars for picture quality. I suggest at least128MB of storage. I have owned several Garmin products over the years and find the products to be of quality with excellent customer support. I considered the larger dashcam models with additional features but found them to be too distracting for my needs.

UPDATE 4: Throughout several phones and app updates, this thing continues to have problems. Updates don't fix things, and Garmin does not seem to care if updates break stuff. My current phone is a Samsung A54, hardly an obscure thing, and it has the endless "connecting" problem when trying to see the live view or access videos.UPDATE 3: I reinstalled the app, and now it won't connect until I go to my wifi settings and "forget" the camera "DC Mini2". Problem: there is no such thing in my wifi list. So I can't remove a thing that isn't there, and the camera refuses to do anything until I do an impossible thing. This. Is. Junk. Do not buy it.UPDATE 2: I took the risk of updating the app to see if they fixed the constant logging-out problem. Now it disconnects from the wifi every 5 seconds, so I can never get any videos off of it. It loads all the thumbnails, and then connects to wifi when selecting one (because it's still too stupid to connect when you open the app), starts loading the video, and then says wifi connection lost. This thing is a useless brick now.UPDATE: In addition to everything below, the app periodically logs you out of your "session", so if you have an accident and want to manually save a clip, you might open the app and be told you need to log in again, so you have to dig around to find your password. AND you need to receive a verification text message code.Overall, it doesn't seem like a good deal for the hardware you get. I kept this camera mostly because I had to. The dash cam market is a mess. I don't want the kind where the display and camera are both hanging down in the middle of my view of the road. I don't know why the standard dash cam design isn't a separate camera you mount to the window and the wire runs to a display/setting device you can mount under the dash.I am going to use the next few paragraphs describing what I think it the worst thing if you plan to use the auto-save features. It seems like an absolute failure from a data-preservation point of view.Marking video to be saved (done by save button, voice command, or crash detection) saves a separate 30-second video file, centered on the time the save was triggered. So if you have a crash at 1:00:15pm, you get a saved clip covering from 1h:00m:00s-1:00:30.BUT!......there is now a period of 7 seconds missing from the main video recording, right from the point the save was triggered. If 15 seconds on either side of a point in time is not enough and you want to manually select a larger clip to save, there will be 7 seconds of reality missing from that new clip. It's like the camera can't handle copying the previous 15 seconds to the new file and also continuing to record new video to the main string of video, so it just gives up on one of its jobs for 7 seconds. There is a clock displayed on the video, and you will see the video skip ahead and the clock will jump forward.Everything is still recorded SOMEWHERE, but 7 seconds of critical time will exist ONLY in the auto-saved clip... which the manual trimming feature of the phone app can't splice in. If you try to manually cut a longer clip, in the middle of playback the video will jump ahead 7 seconds. It will not be possible to save a new continuous clip which includes more time before or after the auto saved 30s clip.Suggestion to Garmin: Why not just have the save function mark the current file as protected (along with either the previous or next file, if the current time is too close to the beginning or end)?The camera also includes a handy voice command to "take a picture". This saves one frame of the video as a separate picture, which is much easier to transfer to your phone if that's all you need. BUT!... this ALSO interrupts the recording process, though for only about half a second. While this is much less than the 7 second skip from saving a video, you now have a fraction of video fully missing which does not exist anywhere!OK, now some various comments:I like having display and controls separate from the camera. It's ridiculous how most dash cameras force you to have the camera and the controls in the same location. I don't know why there aren't loads of dash cams made which have the main good camera on the end of a wire and a display/button unit mounded on your actual dash (or under it, etc).App instructions are unclear. To connect to the camera, you need to turn on 3 things on your phone:1. Wifi (NOT your phone's hotspot feature, wifi like you don't have Internet service, but used to transfer videos)2. Bluetooth (uses for basic commands)3. Location (I have no idea why, but it won't connect if you don't)The app is mysteriously slow at establishing the wifi connection to the camera, but it does not bother trying to connect when you open it. It waits until you do something which NEEDS it. Why not start working on that in the background as soon as I open it?Initial setup was confusing because by default, it was set to only use a wifi connection (not cellular data) to upload to the vault. If I am in a crash, what are the odds I happen to be connected to an existing wifi spot? I was not prompted to choose this when starting it the first time, it was just set to this absurd option in one of the menus.Video quality is medium. Not great for night, OK for day. Expected for a midrange 1080p sensor.The included USB cable is for power ONLY. Annoyingly, you can't unplug it from the power block and connect it to a laptop or USB OTG adapter to transfer stuff to your phone without wifi. To do that, you will need to disconnect the cable at the camera end and use another USB cable.When saving a video clip, it is not always clear what is happening. FYI, the export screen's status bar means loading to phone. Upload to cloud status is not shown and happens in the background.The clip-cutting setup of the app is great (as long as you haven't lost 7 seconds of time from an auto save). Videos are all grouped with a single icon per day. A day is then displayed as a single timeline, and there are sliders you can use to select start/stop points for a clip to export. Tapping and holding the sliders will zoom in on the timeline so you can be precise.Something which makes up for the terrible auto save feature (which I disabled) is that this camera supports HUGE 512GB SD cards. Buy as much memory as you don't mind paying for, and you don't have to worry about critical footage being overwritten any time soon. A 64gb card holds about a week worth of driving for me.Accessory note: Garmin sells a separate polarizing filter which reduces glare. For what Garmin wants for this camera, they should have included it for free.Cloud storage: If you upload a clip to Garmin's cloud storage, they save it for free for 24 hours. You can generate a shareable link to the file and email it to people. They have a monthly subscription option if you want to store videos on their server longer, otherwise there is no fee for any features.App warning: You need to be logged into the app to connect to the camera (yikes). Save the password somewhere on your phone.App warning 2: There is an option in the app to set the camera to delete video after only 3 minutes! Make sure this is not turned on. I have no idea what kind of wannabe secret agent is using a phone/web-connected dash cam but also thinks their driving history is so secret it must vanish after 3 minutes.