This is in response to the OP. Hope to get to other comments later.
The first thing I want to address is the idea that there were no SmartThings staff at the SmartThings booth area. As the person who organized our CES demos and displays this year and planned for the 35 employees to go to Vegas and participate, I can tell you that I was there for something like 30 hours of booth duty and many more people from SmartThings were too. Anyone with a SmartThings shirt on is an employee and many times there were 6+ of us in the booth. We had people from across the organization including engineers, support, business development, QA, and more.
True there were non-employees participating in similarly colored blue shirts (that did NOT say SmartThings on them) and, true, those people could only answer a few questions focused on the specific area of the smart home they were standing in, but to say there was no one there from SmartThings is not accurate. Sorry you couldn’t find us.
End preamble… here are some answers to the questions you posed:
i asked if the camera streaming without dvr service would be available as the free service and he could not give me an answer.
We are still working through all the details of the Premium Service offering but I expect a streaming view to be available without the DVR service. You won’t be able to save clips based upon triggers or go back and review but a live stream should be possible.
On the sensors they are all now using coin cell batteries and the motion detection does not have a micro usb to power it. The person did say though that the zigbee mesh network would still work without a dedicated power which wasn’t on the first or second version of the motion detector so it would be nice to get clarification on this?
Only plugged devices extend the ZigBee (or Z-Wave) mesh networks.
Also i tried to reference this article: SmartThings’ next-generation hub will support Thread and the OIC to him and more specifically if the plan for you guys to eventually switch to the Tizen operation system was true or not. If you do make the switch my next question is why is it a lighter operation system that will operate faster of what?
There isn’t a plan to drop support for Android but we are looking into adding Tizen OS support. There are many cool aspects to Tizen and much has already been written of that but again, we are not “switching to it” we would add it like we added Windows phone support.