Thinkware F800 WiFi App Guide

The Thinkware F800 has a wifi function that can be connected in one of two ways. The first way is the more traditional method of connecting to the camera's WiFi network through your WiFi enabled Android or iOS device. To do so, click the WiFi button on the camera and open up the F800 WiFi app. The other method is to turn on your phone's hotspot and have the camera connect to your hotspot network. With this method, the benefit is that you retain cellular data connectivity so you can still use your phone for navigation and other apps that require internet. The first time you set up this hotspot, you'll need to go into the app to program your hotspot details into your F800. Follow the steps on screen and it'll take care of the rest! Once your F800 is connected to the hotspot it will say "connected to the internet".

If your phone and Thinkware F800 are connected together properly you'll be able to access the app menu. This is the home screen which has a few different options. The live view option lets you see what the cameras are seeing, you should use this to aim the camera. If you are planning to use the ADAS features, there are also guide lines for where how the camera should be aligned with the edge of the hood. If you aren't sure about your time zone settings, you can also confirm the device's time by looking at your live view screen. 

First, we'll go through the set up procedure in the dash cam settings menu. There are 5 sub-menus here which we'll go through in order. Note that while you're going through the camera settings, the dash cam will not record so we recommend doing this while the vehicle is pulled over. 

The memory card settings configure the partition and overwrite functions of the Thinkware F800. If you're planning to use parking mode on your dash cam, we recommend the parking priority setting which will maximize card space for motion detection and parking incidents. You can also turn off overwriting in specific folders but note that when these folders fill up, you'll need to clear them by formatting the card. For a breakdown of what the different partition settings, check out our written guide.

In the camera settings, you can adjust the video brightness and rotate the rear camera if you accidentally installed it upside down. The brightness can be adjusted independently but this setting will affect the brightness during day and night situations. The super night vision 2.0 feature can be set up in the record settings menu which will also have an effect on the image quality. 

We recommend going through the record settings when you first set up your dash cam. If you plan on using parking mode, you must turn it on here and choose either motion detection or time lapse mode. Parking mode is not enabled by default. You can also configure your timer and voltage cutoff settings here. The new "wintertime battery protection" option will increase the cutoff voltage by 0.2 volts in colder months as batteries tend to be weaker in those months. This is only necessary if you live in a colder location where temperatures drop below freezing. The 24V cutoff setting is reserved for commercial vehicle applications and will not have any effect on normal 12V passenger vehicles.

You will also see your sensitivity settings in this menu. The G-sensor sensitivity is split up between continuous mode and parking mode. We recommend lowering the continuous mode setting as it tends to be too high and will trigger a lot of false alarms in the default setting. The parking mode settings can be increased or decreased to your preference. We don't recommend setting it too low as you want minor parking bumps to be recognized as well. 

The road safety settings is where you can configure the ADAS features of the Thinkware F800. You can enable and disable specific features as well as configure the speed at which they activate. For the lane departure warning for example, we like to set it up so that it only triggers at highway speeds to reduce false alarms when driving around town. The vehicle type option refers to the height of your vehicle with "sedan" being the lowest. 

The system settings of the Thinkware F800 are fairly straight forward. One nice addition compared to the outgoing F770 is the ability to fully mute the device and the ability to turn off the blue LED light on the rear camera. You can turn your speed display off here and change the speed unit as well. If you are unsure of what time zone you're in, look up your city and time zone in a search engine and you should be able to find the correct UTC setting.

If you return to the main menu, you'll see the video file list menu. The videos are categorized by the recording type but at the bottom you'll also see downloaded videos which are the ones saved on to your phone's hard drive. If you click into one of the recording mode types, you'll see a list in chronological order of all the files in that folder. You can sort the clips by front and rear as well to filter down your results even more. 

If you click the option icon next to the video clip, you can download it to your phone's hard drive. You can also click the edit button on the top right which will let you delete individual video files off of the card. If you're not sure if the clip in the list is the one you need, you can click it once which will stream the video rather than download it.  

The last two menus on the app home screen are the dash cam info and Wi-Fi settings. The dash cam firmware version and safety camera database version are listed here. Under the Wi-Fi settings, you can see the various hotspot devices that the camera has saved.