Tested: Nest Doorbell battery operated | Good ideas and harsh reality

The Google Nest Doorbell now comes with a rechargeable battery, can recognize faces, and has a brilliant design in some ways. But it is expensive and does not always fulfill its promises.

Karim Benessaieh
Press

WE love

We see from the installation of the Nest Doorbell that Google engineers have thought of the small details. This new model includes a rechargeable battery that will allow you to screw it onto any door or surface, without worrying about wiring. Its advertised autonomy is between one and six months, depending on your use.

We start by charging it by inserting a USB-C cable for a few hours and configuring it with the application. Google home. A video shows us how to first install its metal bracket, and a nice surprise awaits us: the box contains a second angled bracket that allows you to center the vision of the camera if you install the doorbell on one side of the door. A good idea.

Once the doorbell is fully charged, it is anchored to the support on the door. To remove it later in order to recharge it, no need to unscrew it as you have to do with the Ring doorbell, the rival offered by Amazon. With the Nest doorbell, all you have to do is insert a special key provided at the top of the device to unhook it. Once again, great find.

From there, whenever the doorbell detects a presence, it sends a notification to your mobile devices, phone or tablet. It tells you if it’s a person, a package, an animal or a vehicle, and you have free access to videos from the last three hours. If someone rings, all Google Home devices in the house will chime and a voice will tell you that “Doorbell indicates someone has rang”.

You can see live what the doorbell detects in your mobile device, from the app Home, or by kindly asking your Nest Hub with a display. You can also, by pressing the microphone icon, speak to the person at the door.

Video resolution is good, 960 by 1280 pixels for 30 frames per second, with a vertically oriented camera to shoot visitors from top to bottom.

If you subscribe to Nest Aware for $ 8 per month or $ 80 per year, with a 30-day free trial, video events from the last 30 days are available. Mostly, you get the familiar face recognition feature. For each event, you are invited to identify the person with their name.

And it works pretty well, say two out of three times. The doorbell will have difficulty recognizing a person leaving the house, wearing a mask or head covering of some kind. Same limit for the detection of packages: they must be clearly visible and identifiable, which only happened to us once in two.

We like less

We may have defined a more restricted zone of detection of the camera, the Nest doorbell generates many, many false alarms. All it takes is a passerby on the sidewalk or some Halloween decorations fluttering in the wind to trigger a notification. We quickly silenced these notifications in the face of the avalanche of alerts from the first days.

Battery life leaves much to be desired. In 12 days of testing, with a mild fall weather, we consumed half the pile. We dare not imagine what will happen during the cold weather.

At $ 239.99, to which ideally should be added the subscription to Nest Aware, this gadget is expensive.

If you want to hear an announcement telling you that someone is ringing, you must have a smart speaker from Google. Otherwise, you will only have notifications on your mobile device.

One buys ?

Overall, we found the Nest Doorbell a little less useful than the Ring we tested. Its incessant notifications and the not very intuitive configuration in the application Google home are probably to blame. And the autonomy of its battery is clearly insufficient.

But it must be recognized that the recognition of faces and packages, even imperfect, the possibilities of installation and the ease of removing it, as well as the free video recordings of the last three hours are arguments to the advantage of the Nest Doorbell. A user of the Google ecosystem, who already has their smart speaker, will likely be better served with this device.