Android-owning plant-loving techies can now check on their green-leafed friends with the Bluetooth-powered Flower Power from Parrot.
The twig-shaped Flower Power dongle lets you monitor the water, fertiliser, temperature and sunlight status of your plant and tells you whether it needs your attention.
It launched in December with an iOS app, and the Android Flower Power beta app launched this week belatedly takes advantage of the arrival of Bluetooth Smart in Android 4.3.
It’s officially compatible with Google Nexus 4, 5, and 7 devices, HTC One M7/M8/mini/mini 2/max, Moto E/G/X, Samsung Galaxy S4/S4 Mini/S4 Zoom/S4 Duos/S5/Note 3/Note 3 Neo/Mega 6.3/Tab 4 8.0, and Sony’s Xperia Z1/Z1f/Z1 Compact.
As with the iOS version, the Flower Power app helps you identify your plant from a database of more than 6,000 types, and then analyses the data to tell you if it needs water, fertiliser, more or less light, and a warmer or colder location.
You can indulge in all the cloud-created graphs a good app should dispense, and even give your plants nicknames.
Our Aglaonema Commutatum – Alan to his friends – has shot up in the past seven months and is due another repotting, although the Flower Power still has 77 per cent of the power in its AAA battery.
As we said in our Parrot Flower Power review, it should help plant lovers who’ve consigned previous foliage to an early grave to pretend they’ve got green fingers. Even so, Flower Power didn’t tell us it needed repotting – we used our eyes.
Bluetooth Smart is rapidly becoming as the smart home comms tech du jour, even though you can’t monitor Bluetooth Smart devices remotely (unless someone makes a Bluetooth-to-Ethernet hub we’re not aware of).
Now if Parrot can just cross that bridge, and enable their AR Drone to carry a watering can, we’ll be able to keep Alan happy until he outgrows his next pot.
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