Nest on Thursday announced it has four new Google Nest-branded products for consumers. Priced as low as $100, the devices will be offered in an assortment of indoor and outdoor options as well as wired and battery-powered.
The new units include an indoor-only camera, an indoor/outdoor camera, a video doorbell, and a floodlight. Moreover, they essentially replace older Nest IQ cameras and the Nest Hello doorbell.
If you own, or have seen, any of the recent Nest products over the last few years, the designs will be familiar. Nest has been intentional in its choices, opting for muted colors and soft edges. That is to say they work with any environment or setting and blend in instead of calling attention to themselves. Indeed, the IP54 rating means that they’ll be alright in rain and the anti-theft mount ensures they don’t walk away.
Rather than send you notifications for every little activity (snow falling, leaves blowing), the cameras and app let you know about the more important things, like when a package was delivered.
Given these are Google products at their core, they get smarter with each generation. Such is the case here as on-device machine learning can help to detect people, vehicles, animals, and packages, offering notifications without relying on cloud services.
The Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) in the new line lets the cameras process twice as many pixels at twice the frame rate when compared to previous models. And instead of focusing on 4K images or resolution, these cameras work harder on HDR and overall quality. This is not too unlike what we expect in the Google Pixel 6 phones as they’ll also feature a Tensor processor.
The new cameras include three hours of event history and local storage for up to an hour of events in the case that Wi-Fi goes down at home or the office. Nest indicates that this would equate to roughly one week’s worth of coming and going events. Once Wi-Fi is reestablished, things are automatically synced to the cloud.
Google Nest Camera Line At-a-Glance
- Google Nest Doorbell ($179.99) (battery/wired optional)
- Google Nest Cam ($179.99) (battery)
- Google Nest Cam ($99.99) (wired)
- Google Nest Cam with floodlight ($279.99) (wired)
These new devices are now fully integrated into the Google Home app and work with the current generation of Nest smart displays. In other words, you can stay within the same app for managing your Google Assistant tasks, routines, and settings as well as viewing the new Nest cameras.
A Nest Aware subscription, offered in two paid tiers, unlocks more potential, including extending your event video history from three hours to 30 or 60 days. Also included is Familiar Face, a facial recognition technology that further smartens your alerts and notifications. Lastly, Nest Aware Plus allows for continuous 24/7 video history on wired Nest Cams.
Availability
The new battery-powered Nest Doorbell and Nest Cam, available for preorder immediately and go on sale August 24. The Doorbell is offered in four colors (white, beige, green, or gray)Â whiles the Nest Cam is available in white.
The other two products are listed as “coming soon.”
