Table of Content
- Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen) review: Other smart features
- Networking options - 6 groups of items - 26 total selections
- An entertainment hub
- See the Google Nest Hub Max, its new features, tech specs, price, and release info.
- Service & Repair options - 5 groups of items - 13 total selections
- Google Home Hub Review
- Refurbished options - 1 groups of items - 11 total selections
The network isn't immensely popular right now, but more and more companies offer cross-brand compatibility. We're heading in the direction of a more unified smart home system, and the Google Nest Hub is prepared to keep up. With Ambient EQ, Hub adjusts to match the colors and lighting in its environment, so photos on Hub seamlessly blend in with your home decor. Get your personalized schedule, commute, reminders, and more with Voice Match.
In Discover, the Nest Hub surfaces various features to help you learn what it can do. The Nest Hub's interface is intuitively organized and easy to navigate, with tabs at the top for Your Afternoon , Wellness, Home Control, Media, Communicate, Family, and Discover. Your Afternoon is a home screen from which you can access the weather, news, smart home controls, your previous night's sleep data, and other useful features based on the time of day. First, it’s worth re-iterating that the Google Home Hub doesn’t support G Suite (paid-for) accounts for email, calendar appointments or Google Photos.
Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen) review: Other smart features
It made it much easier for my kids to stay in frame than with other devices that have a more limited field of view. You can look at the screen and raise your palm to pause and resume anything that is being played, such as music, video, or a podcast. This worked surprisingly well in my tests and was great for when my hands were wet or dirty and I couldn’t touch the screen or I didn’t want to use a voice command.
You can broadcast music and video from a wide variety of apps straight to the speakers with minimal hassle. Unfortunately, Netflix casting support is still absent from both products, but app support is otherwise the same as a regular Chromecast. We've always liked Google's smart display UI, but the new Nest Hub revamps the interface to make controlling all the best smart home devices more intuitive. My one qualm is that the display returns to the home screen if you don’t tap on your devices fast enough, but the interface upgrade makes up for it. Of course, I could always manage my devices, as well as make voice calls, launch videos and get answers to queries by asking Google Assistant aloud, too.
Networking options - 6 groups of items - 26 total selections
You can set up the display brightness to work just the way you like it, too. There are options to have the aggressive dimming on all the time instead of just when the screen is idle—which I highly recommend—and you can set how bright or dim, generally, you want the auto brightness to be. You get several ambient modes to pick from, and you can have the display turn off completely if you want. Google Smart Display devices have thus far been made by LG and JBL, and we did a full review of the Lenovo Smart Display. Unlike Android, Google currently has full control of the Smart Display software no matter who manufactures the hardware.
I appreciate that, but the Echo Show 5 has a privacy slider that should alleviate those concerns for most, and would be nice to see here. Google is launching two new photo features in its Google Photos app that are optimised for the Home Hub. You can select the people you want to appear in Live Albums, and Google will use artificial intelligence to pluck photos with those people in them and share them to your Hub's home screen. The Google Home Hub's physical form was inspired by a photo frame, says Micah Collins, a director of product management at Google. The Hub has a floating design, with the 7-inch display hovering slightly in front of its lower half, where the speaker is housed. The display might not seem like much on a spec sheet, with only a 1024×600 resolution spread across a seven-inch panel, but it looks great.
An entertainment hub
If you keep the Nest Hub in your kitchen, meanwhile, you can use Quick Gestures to pause a cooking video when your hands are dirty. It's a bit disappointing to see that the new Nest Hub still doesn't have a camera for video calls. The company says this is intentional for privacy reasons, so people will feel comfortable putting the device in their bedroom.
But compared to the Echo Show, the Hub Max doesn’t sound nearly as full or powerful. If you’re looking at the Hub Max with the intention of using it mostly for listening to music, the Echo Show is a better device. The Nest Hub does not provide specific sleep cycle data like some fitness trackers do, but the actionable sleep tracking data is among the most comprehensive I’ve seen for a consumer-facing device. That is, when the data is accurate — one night, I accidentally placed a glass of water in front of my display, interfering with radar sensing.
Google Nest Hub Max Specs, Price, and Release Date (Video)
You can always swipe right on the screen to go back a page, or swipe up for quick settings like volume and brightness. You can't download apps or browse the web as you could on an ordinary tablet, but all of the content of the Google Nest Hub is meant to be visible from across the room. Google will even show you how to get there on a map and send the directions to your phone.
Google is only selling the Hub Max in two colors, a dark grey or a lighter grey, instead of the multiple color options the standard Hub offers. View and control compatible lights, cameras, TVs, and other devices from a single dashboard. The lack of a front-facing camera for Google Duo could be a cost cutting measure, but an odd one given how video calls have been a selling point of Smart Displays and it being the company’s only successful social app.
The top bezel houses an ambient light and color sensor, but no front-facing camera. During the setup process, the app asks if you want to enable Quick Gestures, a new feature that lets you control the Nest Hub with hand motions instead of having to actually touch it. With Quick Gestures enabled, you can simply wave your hand in front of the display to snooze your morning alarm. In testing, this feature worked perfectly, and is incredibly convenient when I'm still half asleep in the morning and want a few extra minutes of shut eye.
Meanwhile, the lack of a camera could be aimed at courting privacy-conscious consumers. It supports Voice Match to identify users and deliver their calendar, commute, and reminders; tasks that all benefit from the screen. That said, while Google Assistant is better at understanding more conversational language, Alexa still offers slightly more support for various smart home devices. Ultimately, the two are pretty well matched up, and both are excellent virtual assistants.
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