Meet Circle Home Plus: Review and Complete “Noobie” Guide
Here’s a comprehensive Circle Home Plus review to help you decide if you should skip or buy this device. Keep reading to find out more.
RELATED: Parenting Tips for Monitoring Your Children in Today’s Digital World
In this article:
- Noteworthy Features
- Tech Specs
- Circle Home Plus Benefits
- Pricing
- What’s in the Box?
- Circle Home Plus Reviews
A Comprehensive Circle Home Plus Review
Noteworthy Features
Here are the features you should expect from Circle Home Plus:
- Wireless Pairing — Wirelessly pairs with your home Wi-Fi, allowing you to manage all connected devices, including laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
- Mobile Compatible — Allows you to manage from your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet.
- Basic Features
- Filter
- Usage
- History
- Premium Features
- Time Limits
- Bedtime Function
- Off Time
- Pause
- Location
- Rewards
- Android and iOS Compatible — Supported software includes Android (Lollipop or later) and iOS (10.0 or later).
Tech Specs
- Material: Plastic
- Dimensions: 3.2 x 3.2 x 3.2 in.
- Weight: 1.15 lbs.
- Color: White
Circle Home Plus Benefits
Circle Home Plus allows you to monitor and manage Wi-Fi usage in your home. This is especially beneficial to big households where kids and adults share the same Internet connection.
- Age Restriction — The Internet is replete with all kinds of content. Not all of these are suitable for all ages. This is why it’s crucial for parents to properly limit or even hinder their kids’ access to certain websites and apps. With Circle’s age-based filters, this level of control can be done with ease.
- Pre-K Filter: You can use this setting on tablets and other devices toddlers use.
- Teen Filter: This filter can be used to regulate content for teens.
- Adult Filter: Set-up this filter to ensure sites with adult content or pornography are blocked.
- Time Restriction — Internet usage has its benefits. The most obvious is quick access to information. It has its downsides as well. For one thing, there’s gadget and Internet fatigue. To ensure your entire family uses the internet in a healthy manner, you can maximize the various time restriction functions of Circle.
- Off Time Function — Useful during your kids’ study time
- Bedtime Function — Can be used to ensure everyone stops toying with their phones at bedtime. It’s even possible to cut a particular family member’s Internet access, or the entire family’s for that matter, should the need for it arise.
- Send Rewards — If your kids have been really good and you want to give them a treat, you can send them virtual rewards. This includes an extension on their Internet usage time limits and giving them a later bedtime.
- Online Usage at a Glance — Circle Home Plus lets you in on how the members of your family use the Internet. From the sites or apps they regularly visit, to the amount of time they stay online, you’ll be able to stay informed. This means that before one of your kids get hooked on what you deem is potentially problematic, you could preemptively come to their rescue.
- Customer Support — It also offers an extensive Help Center, and 7-day tech support to assist users with questions about their device.
Internet Fatigue Definition: Sheer exhaustion resulting from compulsive internet usage.
RELATED: Parents Guide To Your Kids’ Social Media Apps
Pricing
You can find a Circle Home Plus (2nd Gen) for $129.99 on Amazon. It already includes a one-year Circle membership, which gives you access to all of the premium features. After the first year, it’ll be $9.99/month.
The Circle mobile app is free and can be downloaded through the App Store and the Google Play Store.
What’s in the Box?
Every Circle Home Plus purchase comes with the following:
- Circle Home Plus
- Quick start guide
- Power adapter
- USB cable
- Ethernet cable
This device must be paired with your existing router. Here is a list of compatible routers:
- Actiontec/Telus (except T3200 and T3200M VDSL)
- Amped
- Apple
- Asus (except SRT-AC1900)
- Belkin
- Calix
- Cisco
- D-link
- Eero (except Eero v1)
- Jensen Scandinavia
- Google (except OnHub TGR-1900 and SRT-AC1900)
- Hitron
- Linksys
- Motorola/Arris
- Netgear (except AC1750 Nighthawk R6700 (v2), AC3000 Nighthawk X6S R7900P, and AC4000 Nighthawk X6S R8000P)
- Securifi
- Synology
- Technicolor
- Tenda Nova
- TP-Link (except TGR-1900 OnHub)
- Ubiquiti
- Xfinity (Comcast)
- Zyxel
For the full list of compatible routers, you can check out Circle’s official website. Some of these routers will require special setup to be successfully paired with Circle. Before purchasing, it is crucial to first check against the list above to ensure the router you have at home is compatible with Circle.
Circle Home Plus Reviews
Circle Home Plus is a necessary technology, especially for parents who want to safeguard their kids from all sorts of malicious content found online as well as from the harm of extended gadget usage.
With a price tag that falls on the midrange value of products under the same category, Circle Home Plus gives you more than your money’s worth. These are sentiments shared by people who have already bought and used this product.
It has a 3.8/5 Best Buy rating from more than 40 reviews. 74% of these reviewers said that they’d recommend the product to a friend.
One reviewer called the Circle Home Plus the “Tech Control for the Non-techie” and would recommend it to anyone looking to monitor a child’s Internet habits.
Check out these other reviews from users who have purchased this device on Best Buy:
Meet the new Circle in this video from Meet Circle:
If you want to accurately keep tabs on how your kids are spending their time online and teach them about Internet safety, Circle Home Plus is worth including in your shopping list. As discussed in this review, this product is packed with features that will allow you to monitor and manage all of your home network’s connected devices.
What are your thoughts about Circle Home Plus? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Pricing Disclaimer: Please note that prices on this list are subject to change without further notice based on price fluctuations on Amazon. Please refer to the links for actual prices. All prices on this list are accurate as of June 3, 2019.
