Google Nest Hub Max hands-on: A great all-in-one for your smart home.
Google has announced the Nest Hub Max, a new Smart Display that doubles as a control center for Google and Nest devices. It’s also renaming the Google Home Hub to the Nest Hub.
The Nest Hub Max has a 10-inch display, giving you significant amount more screen size than the Google Home Hub. That makes it one of the largest Smart Displays available today (the Lenovo Smart Display also comes in a 10-inch variant).
The speaker comes with stereo speakers and a built-in Nest camera that will act as a security cam, like the Nest Cam IQ Indoor, as well as letting you make video calls with Google Duo. The camera will pan and zoom as you move around the room too, with its wide-angle 127-degree lens.
As for those security features, you’ll be able to remotely video the camera on your smartphone (you’ll see a green light appear on the Hub when someone is viewing). You’ll need a Nest subscription if you want to make use of other features like motion detection, however.
Nest’s isn’t the first Smart Display to include a camera, but Google decided against putting one in its own Home Hub, which will remain camera-less under its new Nest name.
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While Google is promoting privacy as core to the Max, you can opt to make use of the new ‘Face Match’ feature, which will recognize different household members and display information that’s specifically relevant to them. It’ll support up to six people. And talking of privacy, there’s a switch on the back of the Max that will turn off both the camera and the microphone.
One of our favorite aspects of the Google Home Hub is how it doubles as a digital photo frame, and the Hub Max does the same – just on a bigger screen. You can also watch videos from YouTube, HBO Now and more (obviously some of those will require a subscription).
As for that Google Home Hub rebrand we mentioned at the start, not only is it now named the Nest Hub, it also costs $129, which is $20 less than what it was. Meanwhile the Nest Hub Max will cost $229 and is coming this summer.
