Tested: Battery-powered Nest Cam | Need a tune up

The Nest Cam, now available with a rechargeable battery, offers good visual quality and integration with the Google ecosystem. But its weaknesses, in particular its autonomy and some software problems, make it a difficult device to recommend.

Karim Benessaieh
The Press

WE love

The physical setup of the battery-powered Nest Cam is well thought out. After having recharged it with its very special plug, with a unique design to discourage thieves, you simply stick it on the base that you have screwed to a wall or a tree. Magnetized, the camera can take just about any angle to cover your driveway, yard, or garage entrance.

It is designed to withstand bad weather well, even if it is specified that it is not completely waterproof. Battery life depends on frequency of use. We will come back to it.

For the configuration, it is enough the first time to follow the guide from the application Google Home. We scan the QR code and the camera then appears in the application, where we can watch the 1080p image sent live or find the entire history of detected movements. It works at night thanks to six infrared LEDs capable of illuminating up to 6 m. Its motion detector covers 110 degrees, up to 7.5 m. Its microphone and its small loudspeaker make it possible to interact remotely with visitors.

Google is particularly generous on one aspect: without a subscription, you have access to the last three hours of recorded events. In the event of a failure, the Nest Cam can save up to an hour of recording. The built-in artificial intelligence can differentiate between a detected person, animal or vehicle.

If you take the Nest Aware subscription, at $8 a month, you’ve had the recordings for 60 days. Above all, you can activate the detection of familiar faces: after a few days of identifying people, you will automatically receive a notification telling you that a specific person has been detected.

To try out this rather fun feature, you’re entitled to a 30-day free trial of Nest Aware. Face recognition is not miraculous, especially in winter when toques and scarves blur it, but it works rather well when the person comes towards the camera for several seconds.

Detection notifications are sent to all phones on which your account and app Google Home are activated. If you have a Nest Hub with a screen, you can ask it to show the live image.

We love less

The autonomy of the battery, in conditions of intense use with about thirty events per day, leaves much to be desired. We only got three weeks of use before needing to recharge the battery, fall or winter. It’s very little, and far from the promised month and a half.

As Google provided us with two cameras, we were able to install a second one in a much less busy place, the chalet. With about ten events per month, we only started 30% of the pile in two months. This is what can be considered as a satisfactory autonomy. The problem is that the camera seems to suffer from our Quebec winters. Twice when the thermometer stayed below -20℃ for a long time at the cottage, the camera turned off due to the cold.

As we said, the first installation went smoothly. On the other hand, when we wanted to reset a camera to reinstall it elsewhere, we ran into several bugs and had to try again several times. The camera, incomprehensibly, goes into idle mode and nothing can wake it up. In general, the configuration in Google Home seemed confusing to us.

Finally, at $239.99 per camera — $199.99 off at the time of this writing — the Nest Cam is pricey.

One buys ?

With its ingenious installation system, its face recognition capabilities, the three hours of free recording and the good build quality of the device, the battery-powered Nest Cam is not lacking in attractions. Its low autonomy when it is often requested and the inconsistency of its application however dampen our enthusiasm, especially for such an expensive purchase.

This camera, however, can be recommendable if you already have many Google devices.