Spotty performance holds back the spiffy, new Nest Cam Indoor

Speaker 1: Google just launched its cheapest camera yet the nest cam indoor. Now let's find out if it's the best nest. Yes, best nest yet. Speaker 1: Google's launched four big products in the last couple of months to totally reset its line of nest homes, security devices, an outdoor camera, a camera with a floodlight and a nest doorbell. And now there's this a $100 indoor camera. It's wired, pretty [00:00:30] smart and surprisingly affordable. First let's dive into the nest cam indoors features, and then I wanna take it for a test drive. Then I wanna see how it stacks up against a pretty competitive market. And then finally, I want to tell you whether you should skip it or equip it. You like that rhyme. Speaker 1: Okay. Let me tell you a little secret indoor cameras. Usually aren't that interesting. Don't get me wrong. They do what they're supposed to do, namely record stuff, but they don't have any of those really interesting extra [00:01:00] features that you find on outdoor key cameras or video doorbells, but the nest cam indoor switches that up a little bit with some cool free features like person animal and vehicle alerts. All right, let's come back to that in a minute. You also get the usual 10 ADP video with HDR and night vision. Two way talk is on board as well as six times digital zoom and a 135 degree field of view. Okay. So why do most people want an indoor security camera? It's probably not for those vehicle alerts. I mean, if you have vehicles driving through your house, you've [00:01:30] probably got bigger problems. Maybe you wanna point it out the window at your driveway, but if you're gonna do that, then outdoor cameras or video doorbells are probably gonna serve you better. It's also not so that you can just catch your roommate, drinking your fizzy waters. I see you Andrew. So mainly it's just so that you can make sure that everything is going all right at home when you're traveling or outta the house, since Andrew's already so comfortable stealing from me, we're gonna make him break into the house and see how long it takes the camera to pick [00:02:00] him up and send a notification to my phone. So for first round, Andrew's sneaking in and I get a pretty quick alert time to intervene. Speaker 1: Hey, I see you get away from my fizzy water, but wait a second. While I'm yelling at Andrew to put down my fizzy water, the two way talk isn't even working. And he's just, he's, he's just getting away with it. Okay. Let's give this one more. Try Andrew comes in. [00:02:30] I get the notification. I open it up and I say, Hey, I see you. I see you put that back and it doesn't work again. Speaker 1: My fizzy, I mean, look at that screen. The app says I'm in two way talk and it's not even working. I'm officially out two fizzy waters and [00:03:00] good luck finding any more of that brand anywhere. Thanks, Google. Okay. So now that we've seen the nest cam actually capture that footage, let's pretend that we're not able to look at it right away. Luckily, Google offers free event history, right? Like the other new nest video devices, the nest cam indoor comes with three free hours of a event history. There were some questions about this when I reviewed the nest doorbell with battery a couple of months ago. So let me be totally clear. You can view any events that happened in the last three hours for free. [00:03:30] Once the event is three hours and one minute old, it is deleted from your history. That's a pretty short window of time to review that footage. Speaker 1: I mean, just think about it. If you go to bed and something happens overnight, the vast majority of the time you're gonna wake up and that footage is gonna be gone. That's a problem for a security camera. Now you can get around this. Google will be quick to remind you by subscribing to nest wear for only $6 per month. That'll get you 30 days of event history, plus familiar face to and [00:04:00] sound alerts, smoke, alarm, glass breaking, and carbon monoxide alarms, for instance, and the ability to call 9 1, 1 from the Google home app, upgrade to nest wear plus for $12 a month. And you'll get all of those options. Plus 60 days of video history and 10 days of 24 7 video recording, but not all of nest free features are just for show. Some of them are, are genuinely useful outside of the extremes of a break in. Maybe you want a camera to be able to check in on your pet when you're out of the house, make sure she's not jumping on the couch, which she knows [00:04:30] is out of bounds. So let's see if we can catch pepper, the dog jumping on the couch and just get her to please stop. Okay. We get a quick notification and fit cross. The two-way talk actually works this time. Speaker 1: Hey pepper, get off the couch. You know, you're not supposed to be up there. Pepper, pepper, get down pepper. [00:05:00] Say success. Nest was quick. It accurately identified her as an animal. Despite her uncanny likeness to Andrew, I was actually able to use two-way talk and get her to jump off the couch pretty quickly. We ran this test a second time and immediately ran into a problem though. The nest cam wired seems to have a cool down period for alerts right now, for instance, pepper is get on the couch again right after I told her not to. And guess what? Nest didn't let me know. Not only did I not get an alert, the nest cam didn't even [00:05:30] record it. Well, this seems like nitpicking. The implications. Aren't super encouraging. If someone walks in your door right after you leave who's to say the camera just wouldn't send you a notification because it's still down. Speaker 1: That's not a decision I want my security camera to make. Now let's zoom out for a second. And remember that there's a whole world of indoor security cameras out there from other a hundred dollars options to more affordable ones from developers like wise or blink. So how do they compare nest beats out the similarly [00:06:00] priced devices with its features. Most companies with indoor cameras, between 60 bucks and a hundred bucks like ring and Arlo require subscriptions for smart notifications and any event history, both of which are free with nest nest also brings some nice extra features over competitors. It's got facial recognition, which is unique on the market. And processing happens locally on the device itself. That means that footage doesn't have to be sent to the cloud other than for storage purposes, while ring offers more thorough end to end video encryption, it's [00:06:30] only on wired devices and it's something users have to opt into and ring of course comes with its own set of privacy concerns. Speaker 1: Basically nest is the best indoor camera in its general price range, but surprisingly, the more affordable competitors are the trickier ones to beat wise. For instance, offers free event storage for 14 days and its cameras cost a lot less than a hundred bucks. If you're looking for a Google compatible smart home camera, for instance, the $35 our wise cam V3 still offers the [00:07:00] most smarts per dollar. And it's nearly identical spec for spec to the nest cam indoor. I think nest solution to this is the physical design because this just looks a lot better than this. Google brings four different colors. And one of them, this pinkish one called sand even features a wooden base. I'd love to see a more modular design in the future where you could actually mix and match the camera colors with the base colors. But for now I think a lot of people are gonna be willing to pay a little bit more money to get a device that's a little bit easier [00:07:30] on the eyes. Speaker 1: If you're on a budget, prefer Amazon to Google, or want more cloud video storage for free, why? And blink mini are better are options. The nests newest camera, but if the Google ecosystem nests attractive design and those industry leading smarts, even with their spotty performance are more important to you. The nest cam indoor is probably gonna satisfy your needs. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed the video, make sure to like, and subscribe below, check out the links too, and you can read our full written review or purchase the [00:08:00] camera. Also hit me up with the comments to let me know if you're interested in buying this thing, or I don't know if you have other recommendations or if you just wanna talk about how great pepper dog is. Speaker 2: Hey pepper, come here, come here, come here, Papa. Oh, you want that? You? Hmm. Speaker 1: That sounded really wet. Speaker 3: Yum.