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I found the Nest Hub’s audio surprisingly good for such a small display. Underworld's "Bruce Lee" sounds similarly treble-heavy, with the jangly guitar strums and vocals coming through prominently, but the rest of the track almost completely lacking any bass response. It's slightly louder than the Echo Spot, but it doesn't sound much better than your average clock radio.
Because Google Assistant is already connected to our Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and other Google platforms, integration with what we’re already using is seamless. For example, when we set up the Nest Hub, Google already knew us based on our account and our usage, and therefore calendar reminders and the morning commute outlook automatically popped up on our home screen. If you have a Nest camera connected to the device, you can view footage from it on the Google Nest Hub. We have two Nest cams in our test house and found viewing footage from them was a seamless process. The platform has a robust, ever-growing portfolio of devices it can control. Just be aware that the smart home is still very much an imperfect beast.
Google merges Maps and Waze teams but says apps will remain separate
This is a great update to the Google Home Hub, although it also works on all other Google-powered Smart Displays. Home View is also available in the Google Home app, giving roughly the same level of control, although it doesn’t currently let you change bulb colour, which is a little strange. With very thin bezels all around the screen adding to the effect; the original Echo Show had the same-size screen but looks massive in comparison. I do wish that Google had a similar feature to Alexa’s Follow-Up Mode to keep it listening for the duration of a task. It would have been nice to be able to say “Next step” throughout the recipe, rather than “Hey, Google, next step” upwards of ten times.
Even better, they don’t need to be concerned about mom and dad dropping by anytime they have company over, and the device powers down nicely at night so that they can get some shuteye at the end of a busy day. Students, short on time and full of questions that need answering will love the Home Hub and its prominent focus on Google Calendar. It’s baked right into the main screen of the app and should always keep them on task. If there’s one that’s worth digging into, however, it’s YouTube, as it’s one of the Home Hub’s key services. While we could focus in on any number of these in-depth, trust us when we say that Google handles all of their first-party services with a level of tact and care that’s rare to find in a first-generation product.
The Google Home Hub's cheaper than Echo Show and, maybe, even better
The new Nest Hub can fill a small room with audio, but it doesn't sound better than a similarly priced dedicated Bluetooth speaker. When blasting The Knife's "Silent Shout" at full volume, the drivers distort a bit on the bass hits at the beginning of the song. The highs sound good, but the bass is unfulfilling, especially compared with listening to the same track on the Echo Show 8. Ultimately, audio performance is more on par with the smaller Echo Show 5. Next, the app asks if you want to enable Sleep Sensing, track sound events like coughing and snoring, and get personalized sleep suggestions. The new Nest Hub stands out for its Soli motion sensing chip, which allows it to track your sleep when placed on a nightstand.
You can also answer the Nest Hello video doorbell on the Nest Hub, complete with two-way communication. While we don’t have a Nest Hello in our smart home, we certainly like the idea of having an extra place to monitor movement at the front door. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation.
Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen)
The bass was a bit more present in Selena Gomez’s “Same Old Love,” but still not comparable to the booming bass of the Echo Show. 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.
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. It's the pricing of the Echo Show 8 that really makes the comparison harder than it was last year. Even when it's not on sale, the Echo Show 8 offers a lot of benefits over the Nest Hub for manageable price increase. The Nest Hub remains our Editor's Choice winner for smart displays, but we awarded the Echo Show 8 an Editor's Choice when we reviewed it earlier this year as well.
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.
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. You can watch YouTube on the Echo Show, but only via a browser, which doesn't respond to voice commands. The Home Hub is cheaper than most of the competition and gets much more than just the basics right. It’s more critical than ever before to ensure you wash your hands properly, especially with the pandemic continuing to spread. You simply say, “Hey Google, help me wash my hands,” and from there, it’ll play a tune for 20 seconds to encourage adequate time for washing hands.
Other search results have been formatted for the screen, too, including recent football scores, or illustrating a search with a photo. Two far-field microphones sit on top of the display, primed to listen for your voice commands. Quality is pretty good, although I found that I occasionally had to move a little closer to the display in my kitchen when I wanted to talk to Google. 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. The Google Nest Hub supports a number of music streaming services, including Google Play Music and YouTube Music, Pandora, Spotify and Deezer. 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.
Since Google Photos can be trained to recognize faces, you can ask the Home Hub to show photos of particular people that you select. If you only shoot vertical photos, first of all shame on you, but also don’t worry because the landscape-oriented Home Hub can show two portrait-oriented photos side by side. While the Nest Hub's 7-inch screen is below even 720p resolution , it still looks bright, colorful, and crisp for watching videos. When your devices are set up through Google Home, they will appear on the Nest Hub when you swipe down on the touch screen, letting you control them with taps as well as voice commands. As with all voice assistants, make sure your smart home devices are compatible before making a decision on a smart display or smart speaker, and vice versa. This is an important distinction as this enables you to use commands like “turn off the TV in this room” or “turn of the lights in the living room” without having to remember names like TPLINK BULB 7 or Sengled B8EFS.
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