B00WBJGUA2

I purchased the Nest Cam Security Camera 3-pack. It arrived on time and was beautifully packaged. Set-up took a little time, but was made easier thanks to smart use of bar codes on the back of each camera, in conjunction with the Nest App. So far so good. For most home users, the cameras are useless without a cloud storage subscription. With a subscription, video is stored in the cloud, and you can review historic activity at any point in your history (10 or 30 days) or upon events for example if motion or sound was detected. Without a subscription, you can only watch the video live. Not very useful for security purposes. Nest will not allow you to use third party cloud storage providers so you’re locked into using their facility, which is priced much higher than regular cloud storage.

So I purchased a 3-pack of licenses to go with the three cameras. Unfortunately, Nest only associated two of the licenses with two of my cameras, leaving the third camera without a storage ability, despite paying for it. The third license, according to my account, will be applied to my next camera purchase, essentially rendering one of my three cameras useless. I have no plans to buy another camera. Clearly a bug in their system caused one of my cameras and licenses not to be matched. I contacted Nest support and they would not associate the unmatched license and camera. They told me they may re-review the case once the camera storage trial storage period expired. Despite buying three cameras and three licenses, I have one camera which i useless one license which Nest are trying to get me to buy a fourth camera to use it. Worse, for a business in the security business, they will only review this case once my home is unsecure.

Up to this point I’ve loved Nest’s smoke alarm product. I have five of them and they have served me well. But I’d warn people away from the nest security cams until Nest have fixed the bugs and improved the level of their support, which is close to non-existant. I’m very disappointed with this product.

I already owned 2 Nest thermostats and 4 Nest protects when I purchased this Nest cam. The camera itself seems to be very good quality. The set up was a breeze and camera was operational in just a couple of minutes. The reason for the 1 star review is that if you don’t subscribe to their Nest aware that starts at $10 a month you will have to stare at a banner ad on all of your devices that you have the Nest app installed on nagging you to subscribe to it. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Nest support this morning and was even transferred to a senior level tech who told me the only way to get rid of the banner ad was to subscribe to Nest aware. Guess what? I figured out another way to get rid of the banner ad. I am boxing it up and returning it! Nest should be ashamed to subject customers who have spent good money on their products to this. I am still within my 30 days on my other items I may just box it all up and go with a different brand.

–UPDATE–
I wanted to take a moment and make an update to my original review I gave this product. The original review was made prior to the new app update, which really does an amazing job in increasing overall functionality of the camera as a whole. As you can see in my original review of the product, I was not happy with using the camera as a baby monitor. The previous version didn’t make it conducive to having it in a baby’s room due to limited notifications. That has sense been changed. Now, the camera will give us alerts whenever our child moves around. Very nice. I’d also mention that I really appreciate that Nest took the time to update a previous gen product. All-to-often companies will leave an older product to focus on making it appealing to purchase new products. Not so with nest and I’m glad I made the decision to go with them.

While many of the issues I had with the camera have been fixed, the grainy picture is still an issue. Perhaps I need a degree in network engineering to really get the best picture. It’s good, but it just doesn’t have a crisp clear picture. But, for what it is, it’s more than enough.

I can’t say enough good things about the new app. The feature to scrub through a timeline to quickly see activities is perfect. There’s no load time / buffering when going back, I don’t know how the engineers at Nest were able to do this, but their video compression algorithm is really top notch. Maybe they’re using the middle out compression. Regardless…a tip of the hat to them.

I’m planning on buying the new outdoor camera soon and possibly another indoor camera. I’ve also updated my previous review from a 4 star to a 5 star. Well worth the investment. By updating the app they have given new life to this product!

–ORIGINAL REVIEW–

While the nest cam is “cool” and works as it should, I simply can’t give it 5 stars.

We invested entirely into the nest ecosystem. We purchased 2 thermostats, the smoke alarms and the nest cam.

Like other nest products it’s a design gem! Small, attractive and website and app are very well designed and work great! It’s ease of use and functionality are the few shining stars in this product. Through the app, setup was done very quickly, and it starts working fast as well.

The picture quality is ok, not amazing by any means (not sure how they call it 1080). It is somewhat grainy, the night vision works great, but the overall picture is just grainy. Also, you can’t really keep it in 1080 or it’ll freeze.

The “alert” system is oddly conceived. You only get alerts every 30 minutes. So, since we use the unit as a baby monitor, we have to constantly keep an eye on it. It won’t alert you again until you enter into a new 30 minute window.

Remotely viewing the camera (which technically is the only way) works okay as well. Sometimes it freezes and you have to reset the app and start over. But I’ve never just not been able to join it. Although sometimes it seems like it takes a while, but I’ll chalk that up to a bad network connection.

The dvr function or cloud storage is great. The monthly fee is a bummer but it’s a good service and worth it.

Overall I give it 4 stars. It’s pricy for what it is, but it’s still cool.

If you are looking for this as your baby monitor I suggest you keep looking, until they update the app to be a better baby monitor.

Baby monitor: 3 out of 5
Security camera: 5 out of 5