Google Nest Hub (2nd gen)
Google spoils an otherwise brilliant product with plans to charge for its most innovative feature
PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from store.google.com
Once products have matured, improvements typically come in small steps or big lurches in direction. The second-generation Google Nest Hub unusually co mbines both, making a series of incremental improvements and addi ng one major new feature that alters th e trajectory of Google’s smart screen.
The new Nest Hub is designed not only to act as a smart speaker – for listening to music, podcasts and radio, answering questions, viewing photos and controlling smart home kit – but also employs Soli low-energy radar technology to track your sleep. In doing so, Google has turned what was a general-purpose smart screen into the ultimate bedside alarm clock.
Core features
What the new Nest Hub doesn’t give you is a radical new design. There’s a new colour this generation (“Mist”) and the enclosure is now built from 54% recycled plastic, but to look at it’s indistinguishable from the old Hub, with a 7in, 1,024 x 600 touchscreen mounted at a tilted-back angle on a fabric-covered base. If you look closely, you can see that the plastic rear panel no longer wraps around the edges of the glass front, lending the speaker a sleeker, more sophisticated look. Other than that, it’s business as usual.
As with the first Nest Hub, there’s no camera; instead, the three dots you can see are the speaker’s two far-field microphones and an ambient light sensor, which is used to set screen brightness and colour temperature. The only physical controls are a microphone mute switch on the rear of the display and a volume rocker behind the screen on the right side.
Setup is carried out via the Google Home Hub app on your phone or tablet (both Android and iOS are supported). It connects to the internet via Wi-Fi – Bluetooth is also available – using Google Assistant to do all the usual smart speaker things. It streams Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube
Music (but not Am azon Music) and controls compatible smart home devices such as light bulbs, smart plugs and security cameras.
You can also watch TV or movies from Netflix, Disney+, YouTube or All4, or Cast from any compatible app. It’s good to see that one of the first Nest Hub’s best features makes a reappearance here: its integration with Google Photos, which turns the Nest Hub into a digital photo frame.
Sleep tracking
The biggest change to the Nest Hub is one you can’t see. Using the Soli radar technology first seen in the Google Pixel 4, it can detect motion, including small movements such as breathing, and it combines this with its light sensor and microphones to build a picture of how disturbed or restful your sleep was.
Before you get too excited, note that “Sleep Sensing” is an optional feature. While it’s available on “free preview” until some point in 2022, Google plans to charge for the feature via a paid subscription. That’s a hugely disappointing move, but
Sleep Sensing does hold key advantages over sleep-tracking tech built into wearables.
First, though, the disadvantages: for Sleep Sensing to work, the Nest Hub must be level with your sleeping position, so you may need to pop a book or two under the base to get it to the right level. It must also be placed a foot or so away from your body with nothing in between you and the speaker, and set at an angle so the radar can detect your movements correctly. Once you have dialled that positioning in, you calibrate your “sleep spot” so the Nest Hub knows where you sleep and you’re good to go. Don’t move the speaker, though, or you’ll have to recalibrate.
Once you’ve slept with the Nest Hub 2 next to your bed for a while, the data gathered appears in two places: as a card on the Hub’s display, which you can tap to drill into, and within the Google Fit app. As with most sleep-tracking technology, it tells you how long you were asleep and how much of that time was restful or restless, and it shows you when those periods were, plus the times when you got out of bed. The app doesn’t split sleep into REM, deep and light like many wearable sleep trackers but it does tell you your breathing rate and gives you a sleep “efficiency” score based on how much of the time you spent in bed was sleep.
One thing the Nest Hub can do that wearables can’t is pick up noises with
“It can pick up noises with its microphones, reporting back in the morning how many times you coughed or how long you spent snoring”
its microphones, reporting back in the morning how many times you coughed or how long you spent snoring. It can also detect sudden light changes so you can tell what may have triggered a period of restlessness or poor sleep. Alas, it has no way of distinguishing one snore from another, so if both you and your partner snore this data won’t be of much use.
The idea behind all this is to pick up on patterns and habits and report back, with the ultimate aim of helping you get a better night’s kip. Like any sleeptracking tech, it’s all academic until you actually act on the information it provides, perhaps changing your bedtime routine or going to bed earlier. However, to Google’s credit, it does offer suggestions based on the data it gathers so you have somewhere to start.
I also prefer having a sleep tracker that’s on the bedside table instead of wrapped around my wrist for a couple of reasons. First, you never forget to put it on and it doesn’t need charging, so it’s more likely to provide data on a consistent, long-term basis. Second, it’s never going to be thrown off by you sitting motionless on the sofa watching TV, like many wrist trackers are. And, in general, it works well, with the results matching up with the tracking data garnered via my Polar Vantage V2 watch.
It’s not all about sleep tracking, either. Google clearly wants the Nest Hub to be a smart speaker for the bedroom and has put in a lot of work to improve its alarm clock functions.
It’s now possible, for instance, to set a “sunrise” alarm. This gradually brightens the display over a short period before the alarm goes off to wake you up more gradually. The
Soli radar lets you snooze the alarm by waving your hand in its general direction, although it’s just as easy to dab the onscreen snooze button instead. It’s also good to see that the Nest Hub’s screen dims low enough not to disturb you at night while keeping the screen just visible so you can see what the time is.
A nest of sounds
Aside from sleep tracking, Google has made a huge improvement in sound quality by applying what it learned in the development of the Nest Audio ( see
issue 317, p75). The result is a much more musical listen.
The Hub 2 can’t match the dynamism and impact of the Nest Audio, but it delivers a far fuller, more rounded sound in the lower registers than the first-generation Hub, which sounds scratchy and thin in comparison. Indeed, Google claims the new generation is capable of outputting 50% more bass than its predecessor, and though I’m wary of putting such a precise number on what is such a subjective notion, it certainly sounds a lot richer and bassier.
The Nest Hub’s single 1.7in full-range driver still isn’t quite beefy enough to cope with bass-heavy tracks, however, where the lack of low end robs tracks such as Floating Point’s Karakul or Kraftwerk’s
Elektro Kardiogramme of presence. As a famous Starship engineer once said: “Ye cannae change the laws of physics, Jim.”
Hit snooze, not buy
The new Google Nest Hub is indisputably a fine option if you want a bedroom speaker with extra smarts. The sleep tracking works well, the new alarm clock functions are handy and the sound quality is vastly improved over its predecessor. At £90, it’s also good value.
However, it’s far from the perfect all-rounder. If music is a priority, the Nest Audio would still be our pick of the sub-£100 smart speakers, since it has that bit more punch and muscularity than the Nest Hub second generation.
It’s also disappointing that Google is planning to introduce subscription fees for sleep tracking from 2022, which means most people will miss out on its best new feature once the subscription kicks in. That doesn’t make the second Google Nest Hub a bad product per se, but it does leave a sour taste in the mouth.