Nest Cams

First, we had the Nest thermostat. Gotta have that, right? The first thermostat in the history of time that feels well-designed¹. Works great. Pleasure to use and look at.

Then we got the smoke alarm. Why not — seems nice².

Then we got a free Nest Mini as a promotion when Miranda went Android for a while and got a Pixel phone. We ended up using it a bit.

Then we got a Ring doorbell as that seemed kinda cool, and paired it with a Nest Hub, as it has a display, that way would could glance at it and see who was at the door.

This put us pretty deep in the Google Home related devices land. We ended up with multiple speakers spread around the house and three screens, which we’ve just upgraded to Nest Hub Max’s after deciding we might as well stick with the Google Home ecosystem.

We’ve been wanting cameras of some kind (we had a weird incident with an unwanted late night visitor) so I figured since we’re sticking it out in Google land, might as well go with Nest Cams, as it’ll nestle right into all the stuff we already got.

I’m writing this mostly as I was pleasantly surprised with them.

Their best feature, to me, is that they are battery operated. You screw on a simple base plate wherever, and the camera part sticks to that with a pretty powerful magnet³. So you do not have to worry about drilling a hole in your house and figuring out how to wire it up to your electric system. There is a charging cord, so if one gets low, you just go grab it, charge it up, and put it back. And the charges last months.

Their 6-second video does a nice job:

But it’s true that they nestle right into the Google Home system. That app picks them right up and you can pop in there and look at what they are seeing anytime. They detect motion and people, so there is always a reviewable history of moments when it’s seeing those things.

There is pretty much just one thing I don’t like about the Google Home ecosystem. It’s that the Nest Hub’s aren’t music playing targets on Apple AirPlay. Of course they aren’t, as they are frenemy companies and wouldn’t want to work together too nicely. We have one Sonos device and that works fine with AirPlay, and Spotify can play to them OK, but not my Apple Music. You can even pair an Apple Music account to them, but all that does is use that as the default service if you ask to play a song or playlist or whatever. I can’t just be using Apple Music on my phone and choose one of the Google Home devices or zones to play to. Boooo.

1. I’ll say that we did ultimately “downgrade” ourselves to the non-smart Nest somewhat recently. Our house just likes to be a temperature. The smart-ness of the classic Nest tries to be too smart and liked to mess with crap. ↩︎
2. It was fine. We don’t have it anymore since we moved from the house I first put it in. I didn’t love it enough to get them for the new house. ↩︎
3. Which, I suppose, means you could walk up to any of my cameras, and if you could reach it, just pull it off and walk away with it. ↩︎