Google Nest Hub Review: Small, Simple, and Smart
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This is surprising, since the Google Assistant-powered JBL Link View and Lenovo Smart Display have cameras and can use Google Duo for video calls. Honestly, I think the Home Hub seems a little cheap, down solely to the 7-inch, 1,024 x 600 resolution display. The bezels are too fat and softly curved to make for an appealing photo frame, yet there isn’t a clear need for them outside of housing the small ambient light sensor at the top. The Home Hub isn’t ugly as such, but it certainly doesn’t radiate good taste. There are chalk, charcoal, aqua, and sand color options, but you’re out of luck if you don’t like the pastel palette.
It might, for instance, offer to assist in setting up a smart home routine that dims your lighting and plays relaxing sounds to help you wind down. Thanks to the Nest Hub's built-in microphones, it can also detect coughing and snoring, and that audio is processed on the device, not sent to Google's servers. Additional sensors allow the Hub to detect light and temperature changes in the room to offer insights about how those factors affect your shut eye. The new Nest Hub's Sleep Sensing feature is optional, and you can disable it at any time.
Google Home Hub Review
This will work automatically if you have an Android phone and it works on Apple's iPhones too, as long as you have the Google Assistant app installed. The service costs $12 (£12, AU$15) a month after the trial ends and allows you to listen to YouTube's music library without ads. The Google Nest Hub may be small, but it's surprisingly useful in lots of ways, from organizing your smart home to walking you through a complex recipe, to finding you a place to eat if your cooking efforts fall short. The Home Hub, like so many of Google’s hardware devices, is the culmination of years’ worth of software advantages. Here, they all come together in a nice, compact package, which, at $149, undercuts the competition pretty dramatically. Households that are childless or not packed to the gills with Chromecasts, Wemos, Nests, Augusts, and Google Home speakers may find the Home Hub less useful.
This list includes Google mainstays like Google Calendar and Google Play Music, but also apps like Spotify, HBO Now, Uber, NPR, ESPN, Walmart, Target and many, many others. For one, photos - especially those shot on a phone - look great on the smaller screen. Had Google gone for something larger, say in the the 10- to 12-inch range, photos would not have looked as rich or as clear as they do on the Home Hub. Even if you are afraid of what might happen to it, you might not want to put it too far away - the 7-inch HD touchscreen is great up close and, unsurprisingly, much less dramatic when seen from afar.
Nest Hub 2nd-gen
Like the previous model, the new Nest Hub is also capable of controlling many of your smart home devices. Nest trained its Sleep Sensing algorithms with more than 100,000 nights of sleep data from around 15,000 people. Once you get it into position, just lay down in your usual spot, making sure no other people or pets are nearby, then press Start and wait until the Nest Hub finishes calibrating. Once it's set up, if the Hub moves and Sleep Sensing stops working, you can recalibrate it, but I have never had to do that, even though I moved the display several times. When I move it back to the nightstand, I just place it in roughly the same spot it was in before, and it works fine.
Overall, the Google Home Hub provides excellent value at just $149, as long as you’re already a big user of Google’s services. The introduction of a display makes Home more useful than ever before, but I still found some lingering issues getting my smart home setup just the way I want it. We’ve already talked about YouTube integration, which Google is clearly pushing with 6 months of YouTube Premium included in every purchase. It’s a bit of a shame there’s no opportunity for third-party video services to see the same level of integration, but at least casting provides an alternative way in for other apps. Home Hub is clearly built to deliver information from Google Maps, Google Calendar, and Search seamlessly too. The Google Home Hub is about much more than just adding a display — it’s designed as the Hub for all of your other smart appliances.
Direct Competitors and Related Products
Building a smart display is more than just whacking a screen on a smart speaker and taking it from there. It’s about creating a new interface, combining sight, speech and touch. From this point of view, Google has nailed what it is to have a smart display. In my Google Assistant guide, I’ve covered everything in more detail, but I’ll cover the specific points for the Home Hub here. Around the back of the screen, there are dedicated volume buttons and a switch that turns of the microphone to stop the Home Hub from listening in. For sound, you can just swipe up from the bottom of the display and use the touch controls instead.
Its music performance is closer to that of the Echo Spot than the Echo Show or the JBL Link View. The Nest Hub's speaker is loud enough to hear Google Assistant's answers from across a small room, but it can't fill a room with compelling audio. To me, the Google Home Hub only really makes sense in the kitchen, and that’s where mine ended up. It’s the hub of activity in the morning, where you’ll take Assistant up on those calendar reminders, traffic reports, and perhaps even chuck on some tunes to get you in a good mood.
We like the pull-down screen that gives us instant access and control over smart home devices we have connected. My favorite feature of the Nest Hub is now available on third party Google Assistant displays as well. The panel shows a status of your home including how many lights are on and the current temperature. You'll see shortcut buttons for common tasks that change based on which devices you have synced to your Google Assistant. Change the temp of your thermostat, and you'll see buttons and sliders to tweak the temp further or change the mode. The seamless touch controls and intuitive voice commands will even help the tech-phobic members of your family get used to it.
The touchscreen is only really good for recipes, the smart home dashboard, and a photo frame. The rest of it is the same Google Home functionality you can get with a speaker. If you're already in the Google ecosystem and any of those features sound like killer apps to you, go for it.
However, you don't be beaming any video out from your Home as there's no camera. We appreciate the focus on smart home control, the pull-down control panel, and the digital photo frame capabilities. We also appreciate the lack of a camera for those concerned about privacy.
I was able to perch it on my bedpost and the corner of my dresser, which I couldn’t have done with Lenovo’s display, and never had to move any of my belongings to make room for it. The small, affordable Google Assistant-powered Nest Hub smart display is functional and convenient, but won't impress anyone with its sound quality. The Google Home Hub isn’t without its problems, though these are gripes I’ve had with Google’s smart home ecosystem for a while. Setting up devices is very simple, but adding multiple accounts to the Hub was a pain for me. Even once I’d sent and accepted the required invites, I still had to rummage through individual device settings in the Home app to kickstart the feature.
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