Google Home Hub Google Nest Hub Review: A Good Cheap Echo Show Alternative
Table of Content
- Home View, multi-room audio, & other Google Home Hub features coming to all Smart Displays
- Made by Google ‘Interactive Video Streaming Device’ arrives at FCC, likely Google Home Hub
- Google releases ‘Hey Mom’ ad for Mother’s Day, discounts Home Hub to $99
- Digital wellbeing with Google Home Hub
- Direct Competitors and Related Products
- Source: Google Home Hub will be rebranded as Google Nest Hub
- Join the Public Preview to try new Google Home app features early.
And as a bonus, you can pull up videos just by saying “Hey, Google, play a cat video.” You’d have to navigate to YouTube through a browser to do the same on the Echo Show. Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. While it’s not as large or loud as the Echo Show, the Google Home Hub is an affordable and capable alternative for those looking for a smart display. While it’s not as large or loud as the Echo Show, the Google Home Hub—now called the Google Nest Hub—is an affordable and capable alternative for those looking for a smart display. But I wish Google had spent as much time optimizing the performance and experience of the Nest Hub as it has adding new features, which seem to be bogging down the device more than anything else.
It's small - perhaps too small for some people - but it's the best looking of the Assistant Smart Displays so far. It's also a great showcase for what this category of smart speaker can do, particularly with that ambient EQ sensor - and for a fantastic price. Over the course of this month, Made by Google has announced and released its 2018 lineup, including the Pixel 3 and the Google Home Hub. In an interview with The Verge, design lead Ivy Ross and Rishi Chandra of Home and Nest touched on a number of points behind Made by Google and specific products. Previously, she was a staff writer for Tom's Guide, where she wrote about everything from artificial intelligence to social media and the internet of things to. In her downtime, you can usually find her at poetry slams, attempting to exercise, or yelling at people on Twitter.
Home View, multi-room audio, & other Google Home Hub features coming to all Smart Displays
Images that we shot in the afternoon on our phones were uploaded immediately to the cloud via Google Photos, and would then appear on the Home Hub within an hour or two. Add to that basic calling functionality through Duo and some of the oldest members of your family can now keep in touch even when you’re far away. Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica praised Google Home's setup process and its ability to pick up voice commands even from a distance, calling the latter "absolutely incredible". Additionally, in his summary, he wrote that "Why pay $129 for a device that is less capable than an Android phone?". The Google Home smart speaker was released in the US on November 4, 2016, and in the UK on April 6, 2017. In May 2017, Google announced that Home would be heading to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and Japan in middle 2017, and the device subsequently became available for pre-order in Canada on June 2, 2017, with a retail date of June 26.
For Black Friday, however, the Home Hub and smaller Lenovo Smart Display have the same price tag, and I think Lenovo’s might be a better buy. For quite some time we’ve been tracking a second smart display from Google, and today we have further evidence that it is indeed in the works. A blurb on the Google Store spotted today reveals a product called the Nest Hub Max as a 10-inch smart display. Google’s Nest Hub isn’t great for watching videos or TV, or for blasting dance music, but it wasn’t designed for those things. It’s meant to add a convenient visual element to Google’s voice assistant and to help with a bunch of everyday tasks, from cooking dinner and calling grandma to checking the weather and reading the news, all in one place. If you have smart devices from different brands and don’t want to switch between multiple apps on your phone, Home View offers a convenient way to control everything in one place.
Made by Google ‘Interactive Video Streaming Device’ arrives at FCC, likely Google Home Hub
The back is covered in a similar mesh fabric to that which covers the Echo Show. It’s not as nice and smooth as the bamboo backing of the 10-inch Lenovo Smart Display, but it is comfortable to hold and carry. In contrast to the large and flashy Echo Show and Lenovo Smart Display, the 7 x 4.5 x 2.7-inch Google Nest Hub is small and unobtrusive. It’s not ugly, but not beautiful either -- it blended so well into my countertop that dinner guests didn’t notice it. The Nest Hub can measure how long you’ve spent in bed and how much of that was spent sleeping. Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox daily.
Slow might be okay when all you’re doing is looking at photos or asking for a weather report, but when a device is promising to be a true smart home hub, speed matters a lot more. What is certainly the product’s most divisive feature, however, is the Home Hub’s lack of a camera. We certainly appreciated Google’s guised concern for our privacy, some folks will be disappointed that they won’t be able to video chat with loved ones on the Hub.
Google releases ‘Hey Mom’ ad for Mother’s Day, discounts Home Hub to $99
This is clever, but I frequently found the recipes limiting and often not the specific ones I was looking for. After all, it achieves everything it sets out to do, which is to make it easier to interact with Google Assistant and to control all your smart devices from one place. Consider its low price and that it also doubles up as a brilliant digital photo frame, and it’s impossible not to recommend it as our pick of Google’s Home speakers. Google Home includes home automation features, enabling owners to use it as a central hub to control smart devices. Examples of supported devices include the Chromecast digital media player, and products from Nest, SmartThings, Philips Hue, LIFX, LightwaveRF, and Logitech Harmony. Various forms of both in-house and third-party services are integrated into Google Home, allowing users to speak voice commands to control interaction with them.
Google’s been trying to find a use case for the Soli technology ever since it debuted in the Pixel 4 smartphone in 2019, and I think this might be the best application of it yet. The rest of the Nest Hub is just like the prior model, but now you can get it in a light blue color in addition to the light gray, dark gray, and light red fabric options. It still doesn’t have a camera, which is a good thing if you plan on putting this thing next to your bedside, though it now has three far-field microphones instead of the two on the last version. The one thing that the ambient photo slideshow feature in Home Hub doesn’t support is any kind of video or animation. I have hundreds of video clips of my kids that I’d love to see on this screen, even if they were just silent animations, but I can’t do that without casting them to it from my phone. A Google representative says that “the team made the decision to not include because moving content is distracting on a screen, that is specifically for Ambient mode,” but they didn’t rule out adding it in the future.
The Google Home Hub is an excellent example of smart display thanks to its affordable price tag, compact and elegant design and the ability to interact with the Google Assistant with visual elements. There are a number of small quibbles we have, though, and using the Hub can be quite frustrating at times. It's usefulness will also depend on things like what other smart home devices you have around the house.
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. One button on the top of the device turns the microphone on and off, and another on the left side controls the volume. You’d never need to use these if you didn’t want to since you can adjust these settings with Google Assistant as well, but they’re nice to have if you need to be quiet, or don’t feel like barking commands. The sleep tracking is enabled by Soli radar sensors in the Nest Hub’s bezel.
In October 2018, the company released the Google Home Hub, a smart speaker with a 7-inch touchscreen. In May 2019, Google announced that Google Home devices would be rebranded under the Google Nest banner, and it unveiled the Nest Hub Max, a larger smart display. In May 2017, Google announced multiple updates to Google Home's functionality.
If you’re embedded in the Google Home platform, the Nest Hub’s price and compact size make it easy to add to your home, but otherwise, life is too short for slow computers. Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.
I think the Lenovo Smart Display, which has a camera but also a shutter that can cover it up, has found a good middle ground. The screen comes with a feature called Ambient EQ which, when enabled, automatically adjusts the screen’s brightness to its environment. When I began testing the device, the colors on the screen looked a bit washed out. When I turned on Ambient EQ, however, everything instantly looked much better. Strangely, Ambient EQ was the only setting I couldn’t change with a voice command. The Google Nest Hub supports a number of music streaming services, including Google Play Music and YouTube Music, Pandora, Spotify and Deezer.
For Google Home Hub, that will require downloading - or, for some of you, re-installing - the Google Home app. Once that’s locked and loaded on your mobile device of choice, you can simply tap the plus icon under the Home heading, and the app will search for any nearby Made by Google device. After a short pairing process you’ll need to select which room the Hub is located in as well as add any new smart devices you might have purchased alongside the Home Hub. Adversely, if you put it next a window in broad daylight, it’ll dial the brightness back up - though, it will top out around 400 nits. That number is fine for photos but, it does stop videos from looking their best (something we’ll touch on a bit more further in the review).
Google tells me that this limitation is a decision by Netflix and that it’s hoping to be able to add Netflix in the future. On the flip side, some might find the Home Hub to be too small for their tastes and will want a larger version with a bigger display and more powerful speakers. The small size also makes the Hub a little unstable when you tap the touchscreen. I never actually knocked it over, but it wobbled around whenever I touched the screen or adjusted volume. They’re clear, fun and functional, and do nothing but add solid functionality to what could’ve been a generic ‘me too’ product. In practice that means the speaker will dial down the blue light output when it’s on your bed stand before bed before automatically turning the display down to near invisible levels when you turn off the lights.
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