The first security camera to tie into Apple's smart home ecosystem, D-Link's Omna 180 Cam HD makes it easy to keep an eye on things while you're out and about.

The modern smart home isn't just about the ability to control your appliances from afar, it's also about letting your devices talk to each other and start making smart decisions on your behalf. This requires pledging your allegiance to a smart home ecosystem, to ensure your devices can interact and you're not constantly switching between apps and services to get things done.

Making that pledge is difficult when there are so many smart home ecosystems vying for control of your home, from Google Home and Amazon Alexa to Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings and Belkin WeMo. Some ecosystems aim to be as device and platform agnostic as possible but, not surprisingly, Apple HomeKit is a non-starter unless you're an iCentric home.

She'll be apples

D-Link's $329.95 Omna 180 Cam HD requires an iGadget running iOS 10.1 to set up the camera, plus you'll need an iPad or Apple TV 4th generation lying around your home to act as a central gateway if you want to access the camera when you're away from home.

An iPad isn't the most reliable of choices for a central gateway – you might not want to leave your iPad at home and, even if you do, who's to say that someone else in your home won't take it with them as they walk out the door. Alternatively your iPad might run flat while sitting home alone on the coffee table.

To be absolutely sure that your HomeKit camera will always be contactable remotely you'll want to invest in a $239 Apple TV 4th gen for your lounge room – an older Apple TV won't do the job. This makes HomeKit an expensive proposition but, to be fair, it might not be a deal-breaker because if you're running an iCentric home then you probably already own the latest version of Apple's little streaming set-top box.

Get up and running

Assuming you own the right Apple gadgets, the Omna 180 Cam HD is quite easy to set up. You simply download D-Link's Onma app, grant it permission to access HomeKit data and then use the "Add Accessory" button to connect the app to the D-Link camera. This works by simply pointing your iGadget's camera at the code printed on the back of the camera, similar to the way you can scan the code on an iTunes gift card.

If you've never used HomeKit before you'll also need to grant Apple's Home app access to your iCloud account, at which point it should automatically find the Apple TV 4th gen in your lounge room and configure remote access. You can also give the camera a name and link it to a specific room in a specific house, to make it easy to manage all your devices.

Room with a view

After this quick set-up process you can easily call up the camera's live view of your lounge room via Apple's Home app or D-Link's Omna app. If your home is full of HomeKit-compatible gear then Apple's Home app is going to act as your central command centre, but D-Link's Omna app lets you tap into the camera's advanced features and configuration menus.

You can't control where the camera points, nor can you zoom in on objects, but the fisheye lens offers a 180-degree horizontal view which lets you see the entire room when the camera is up against a wall or sitting in a corner. Meanwhile the lens offers roughly a 90-degree vertical view, so you can see most of the floor and ceiling.

The tiny cylindrical camera stands about as tall as an iPhone 7 and roughly two-thirds as wide. Unfortunately the camera doesn't support wall-mounting, instead it's designed to sit on a shelf or tabletop which might not suit every room. Also keep in mind that the camera needs AC power, with a 3-metre AC to micro-USB cable in the box.

Once you've found the right location to place the camera, it offers an 1080p widescreen view of the room with minimal distortion despite the fisheye lens. The picture looks excellent; the colours are a little cool, giving whites the slightest of blue tinges, but the picture is very sharp and there's minimal lag even when viewing from an iPhone over mobile broadband. Obviously you're at the mercy of your home broadband upload speeds.

The camera lens is optimised for indoor, low-light performance – ensuring that you can always see plenty of detail in the room, even if there are brightly-lit windows in the background (the trade-off is that the view out of the window can be lost in a haze of white on a sunny day). It's also an infrared camera with a 5-metre range, so you can see what's happening even if it's pitch black in the room.

Strike up a conversation

While watching the live video feed you can listen to what's happening in the room or turn on your microphone to hold a two-way conversation with someone at home.

While this would let you negotiate with burglars ransacking your house, the two-way audio feature is more likely to be used to talk to loved ones while you're away from home.

You might use the camera to keep an eye on your children after school, or perhaps to monitor strangers you've welcomed into your home such as cleaners or tradespeople – although you might become frustrated at the fact you can't easily mount the camera inconspicuously out of sight, hard-wired into the AC power.

At this point the camera becomes less about burglar detection and more about family safety/surveillance, which presents a whole lot of privacy implications that you'll need to discuss with everyone who lives in the house.

Keep a watchful eye

If you're concerned about uninvited guests you can set Apple's Home app to alert you to movement in the room, plus the motion detector can trigger other smart home events.

D-Link's Omna app splits the camera's view of the room into a 4x4 grid and lets you nominate which areas to monitor. You can also adjust the overall sensitivity, to reduce false positives such as pets walking across the floor or objects moving outside the window. At its default 90% sensitivity, the camera will usually detect a shoe-sized object thrown across the room which passes through a single area on the grid.

When something moves you're immediately notified via a pop-up alert on your iPhone which takes you directly to a live feed in Apple's Home app. You can set the motion retrigger delay to between 30 seconds and five minutes, to ensure you're not constantly notified of the same ongoing event. Bumping the sensitivity up to 100% is unwise as it causes the motion detector to constantly trip even when nothing moves.

Switching to D-Link's Omna app offers a 20-second instant video replay, starting just before the incident, but to take advantage of this you need to slip a microSD card into the camera. It's not designed to keep hours of security footage, just to capture the highlights.

Unfortunately the camera doesn't automatically upload these video clips to the cloud, so if burglars make off with your camera you've also lost your video evidence. The upside of this is that you don't need to pay for a cloud subscription service, but it's a shame that can't tie it into existing cloud storage services like iCloud, Google Drive or Dropbox.

Unfortunately the camera is not smart enough to only send you pop-up notifications when you're away from home, or only during certain times of day, which could have made it a set and forget security device. In this department Apple drops the ball compared to some of the more mature and robust smart home ecosystems.

So what's the verdict?

D-Link's Omna 180 Cam HD has a lot to offer, with impressive picture quality and the ability to quickly alert you when something moves at home while you're out on the road. From a security perspective, its lack of cloud upload features is an Achilles Heel which some users might not be able to overlook.

Merits of the camera aside, it really comes down to whether you're prepared to pledge your allegiance to Apple's HomeKit smart home ecosystem. If you own iEverything then D-Link's Omna 180 Cam HD is a good fit, otherwise you should weigh it up against the competition before taking the plunge.