The Google Nest Hub is unlike any of the best smart displays you’ve seen. Not only is it a speaker for music, a screen for your Google Assistant, and a communication hub, but it also monitors your sleep. Placed on your nightstand, the updated Google Nest Hub uses the Soli radar sensor chip to detect how well (or poorly) you sleep at night. It’s a little creepy and a little fickle, too, but you might forget it’s there.
You can adjust the bass and treble under the Hub’s Audio tab in the settings, but since they were set to neutral in our test, we had trouble enjoying the promised bass boost of the updated model. We rarely dare say that a smart speaker can replace your music system sonically, and the Google Nest Hub is no exception. At maximum volume, the Hub is loud enough to fill the room, but it struggles in the top two volume levels out of ten, compressing in the bass and sounding harsh in the treble.
[content-egg-block template=offers_logo hide=price]As a table, kitchen or nightstand speaker, however, it is perfectly acceptable. We stream Coheed and Cambria’s A Favor House Atlantic on Deezer, and the tricky and nimble track slips merrily through the frequencies with a relatively generous helping of texture through the vocals. The album continues into Blood Red Summer, and the guitars are used judiciously in a cohesive mix.
In the age of smartphones, tablets and laptops that have both a screen and a snapshot on the front and back, a device that has a screen but no camera is a rarity – a bit like an old SatNav device, perhaps. However, this does a disservice to the Google Nest Hub, as there is still plenty of new technology under the hood, and the lack of a snapshot is a deliberate choice. This device is aimed squarely at those who want the added benefit of the visual intelligence of a display, but aren’t eager to have their technology filmed.
To put the Google Nest Hub’s 7-inch touchscreen (1024 x 600) in context, the display area is only slightly larger than the 6.7-inch display on the largest iPhone 12 Pro Max when measured diagonally. There is a white bezel of just over 1 cm in depth around the Hub that is nicely rounded at the edges, but it is more of a functional, value screen than something you would enjoy sitting back and watching movies on.