I have regular trail cams. I kinda like the anticipation of checking a few weeks or months worth of pics all at once. Also I'm not a big fan of text messages and constant dings of squirrel pics might drive me crazy. My 8 double A batteries last close to a whole year if not more. I doubt batteries would last that long in a cellular trail cam. Not to mention - batteries are EXPENSIVE these days.
I have 2 wild game innovations regular cams, one just died. Cant get it to turn on, just red light blinks. Once the screen came on then fadded out.
But the cell cam would be for home security on the other side of my yard. I have some crappy neighbors up the road that are trying to buy the house next door.
Gotcha, seems like the cellular cam would be great for that purpose although I have no experience with them myself.
I did some googling about battery life on cellular trail cams. In general it seems alkaline batteries do not last very long, while lithium batteries last a little bit longer. I saw where some were getting around the issue using an external 6v lithium battery OR using recharcheable batteries with a small solar panel.
Not thrilled with the Tactacam we purchased last year. It eats batteries and recently stopped working. They do want us to ship it back to them so that they can have a look at it.
Bought a 2 pack of muddy mitigator cams. Not hard to set up for a guy that hates technology. Takes hood pics but is an later that I get the pic. Might call them and ask why. I figured a couple min. So far got pics of leaves blowing, deer and my dad stopped to feed my chickens while we were away. He knew I put up cams so he was walking around looking for them.
That is still encouraging tho. One of my cams just started acting up. What it is doing is basically taking 4 pics per second until the batteries die. Last time I took it down since it isn't working but it had around 11k pics on it LOL. My other one still works fine.
Update on the cell cams. One i had to replace batteries twice. Other is still on original batteries. So far I like them. Moved both to my property in wv. No internet there, so I can't see pics while in there. But its a couple min delay if in at home.