Nest is a big name in the world of smart homes. Nest was started in 2011 with the Nest Learning Thermostat, a smart thermostat that can learn people’s heating and cooling schedules in a few days. Nest is owned by Google, which we’re sure you’ve heard of. After buying Dropcam three years later, the company made the Nest Cam Indoor2, then the Nest Cam Outdoor, the Nest Cam IQ Indoor, and the Nest Cam IQ Outdoor.
After the IQ cameras were taken off the market in 2021, the company came out with a new line of Nest Cams that included a battery-powered camera, a floodlight camera, and an indoor camera that you plug in. The new Nest Cams have some of the same features as the older ones, but there are also some important differences you should know about.
The device looks a lot like the Nest Cam Outdoor, which has been taken off the market. But it is a lot bigger than the older model because the battery pack is built in and can’t be taken out. The whole thing is about the size of a coffee mug, and when it’s standing up, it kind of looks like one, too. Aside from the fact that it can be used wirelessly, it has all the features you’d expect from a Nest security camera.
It lets you know when it sees something, automatically records video, saves that video to the cloud, and works well with Google Assistant (but is not compatible with Alexa or HomeKit). But, unlike previous models, it has machine learning capabilities on the device itself. This means that many of its AI smarts can be done quickly and safely without ping Google’s servers. The camera also has a small but powerful speaker that lets you hear what’s going on and project your voice to the area around the camera. This is a lot like the Nest Outdoor Cam that was just talked about.
The magnetic base of the Nest Cam Outdoor is convenient, but it also makes it easy for a thief to pull your camera off its mount and take it. If that really did happen, you would still have video of it. (It would just end up in the sky.) But the Nest Cam is a small and expensive camera that you don’t want to lose.
By default, a recording can only be 30 seconds long, but you can change this to 3 minutes. When an event is detected, it’s not the length that will be recorded, but the longest time a clip can last if motion keeps going. You can only record continuously if you pay for Nest Aware Plus and plug the camera into a power source. But since event detection is so good, most people don’t need to do that.