GOOGLE NEST HUB MAX REVIEW: BIGGER SCREEN, BETTER SOUND, AND A CAMERA

The new Nest Hub Max is a bigger version of the excellent Nest Hub with a few new tricks up its sleeve

Last year’s Nest Hub (formerly Home Hub) from Google is one of my most favorite smart home devices for one simple reason: it’s the best digital picture frame I’ve ever seen and makes it incredibly easy and enjoyable to see the thousands of photos I’ve taken of my kids that are trapped on my phone or in the cloud. The Nest Hub is also a convenient smart home controller and a surprisingly useful smart alarm clock.

But the small Hub isn’t great for everything: the 7-inch screen is too small to really enjoy watching video on for any extended length of time and its speaker isn’t very powerful for listening to music.

So, Google made a bigger Nest Hub. The $229 Nest Hub Max is a lot like the Nest Hub, just bigger. It has a 10-inch display, more powerful speakers, and something the smaller version lacks entirely: a camera. Everything else about it is the same, from its two far-field microphones to its modern, fabric-wrapped design, to its remarkable ability to automatically adjust the screen to the lighting in your home so your photos look more like they are printed on paper than displayed on a screen.

If the Nest Hub was designed to be able to go anywhere in your home, including the bedroom, the Hub Max is meant to go in main living areas, like the kitchen or living room. In fact, after living with the Hub Max in my home for the better part of the past week, I think the kitchen is really the most practical place to use it.

A bigger, louder Nest Hub with more features and capabilities seems like it’d be a slam dunk. But the Hub Max’s bigger size and higher price tag mean it has more to live up to, and even though it’s still an excellent picture frame and competent smart display, it’s not quite as endearing as its smaller sibling.

OUR REVIEW OF

GOOGLE NEST HUB MAX

H2K SCORE

8

OUT OF 10

GOOD STUFF

• Beautiful screen for displaying photos
• Camera can be used for both video calling and home security purposes
• Extensive smart home controls
• Personalized information based on who’s looking at the screen

BAD STUFF

• Sound quality doesn’t match Amazon’s Echo Show
• Can’t play Netflix
• No physical shutter for the camera
• Home screen could be better utilized to display more information
• Doesn’t support G Suite accounts or shared calendars

Buy for $229.00 from Google Buy for $229.99 from Best Buy

T

he Nest Hub Max is quite literally just a bigger Nest Hub. It has the same shape and proportions as the smaller model, just expanded. The 10-inch display is mounted on a base that houses the speakers, which gives the screen a bit of a floating appearance. The Hub Max is a little taller than Amazon’s competing 2nd-gen Echo Show, but both devices take up about the same amount of space on your counter. It’s fine for a kitchen counter or even a mantle in a living room, but it’s likely too big to comfortably fit on a nightstand or other small spaces.

The Hub Max’s greater size and weight do make it a bit more stable than the Hub when I touch the screen (it doesn’t wobble nearly as much). Google is only selling the Hub Max in two colors, a dark grey or a lighter grey, instead of the multiple color options, the standard Hub offers.

The Hub Max has the same controls and layout as the smaller model: volume buttons on the right side behind the screen, and a mute toggle switch to disable the two far-field microphones and camera in the bezel surrounding the display. If you want to disable the camera but maintain the always-listening mics, you can configure that in the Hub Max’s settings. Unfortunately, there isn’t a physical shutter to block the camera’s view, though Google says the hardware switch on the back physically disconnects the mic and camera so it can’t be spoofed. Next to the camera is a green light that will illuminate whenever the camera is being used or shine orange when the camera is disabled.

It also has the same ambient lighting sensor that automatically adjusts the screen to make your photos look as good as they can be in whatever lighting you have in your home. The Hub Max is just as pleasant to look at as the Nest Hub and thanks to the excellent Google Photos integration, it’s just as great of a digital photo frame.

The bigger Hub Max is also much louder and better sounding than the smaller version. It can fill a room with music and gets loud enough to overpower the sound of a running faucet while I’m doing dishes. But compared to the Echo Show, the Hub Max doesn’t sound nearly as full or powerful. If you’re looking at the Hub Max with the intention of using it mostly for listening to music, the Echo Show is a better device.

The Hub Max is not the first smart display with a camera built into it, but it is the first one to let you do more with the camera than just make video calls. The Hub Max can actually “see” who is in front of the display and present personalized things to them, such as upcoming calendar appointments, flight schedules, messages, and package deliveries. There are a few ways this is handy, but one of my favorites is when I look at the display for the first time in the morning and it automatically presents the weather forecast after recognizing me. I can also have the Hub Max display a personalized reminder for someone else the next time it sees their face.

 

You can wave your hand in front of the Hub Max to pause or resume music or video.

Google calls this feature Face Match and setting it up is an entirely opt-in process that involves taking a few photos of your face in the Google Home app on your phone and sending them to the Hub Max. Google says that all of the facial recognition is done locally on the device and nothing is sent to or stored in the cloud. Opting-out of Face Match deletes your facial data from the device. If you don’t set up Face Match for everyone in the home, the Hub Max will default to showing general information and will not display personalized things.

The Hub Max also uses the camera to enable limited gesture controls. You can look at the screen and raise your palm to pause and resume anything that is being played, such as music, video, or a podcast. This worked surprisingly well in my tests and was great for when my hands were wet or dirty and I couldn’t touch the screen or I didn’t want to use a voice command. Google tells me it’s starting slow with the gesture features, but it’s easy to see how other gestures, such as a wave left or right to skip tracks, could be implemented.

The Hub Max will display a notification whenever someone is viewing the Nest Cam feed.

In addition, the camera in the Hub Max is a full-fledged Nest security camera, and you can use it to monitor your home and get activity alerts when you’re away. It supports streaming a live view from the camera to your phone, two-way audio so you can have a conversation with someone in front of the Hub Max and the Nest Aware service that includes continuous video recording and the ability to recognize familiar faces. Whenever someone is viewing the camera feed, the Hub Max will display a notification on the screen and the green light will blink. No other smart display offers this kind of extended functionality with the camera and it sets the Hub Max apart.

Finally, as expected, you can also use the camera to place video calls using Google’s Duo service. The Max includes some clever features to make video calling easier. The camera has a 127-degree wide-angle lens plus automatic subject tracking, which will reframe the image to keep you in view when you move around the room, much like Facebook’s Portal. It made it much easier for my kids to stay in frame than with other devices that have a more limited field of view.

The Nest Hub Max’s wide-angle camera and automatic subject tracking make using it for video calls easier than Amazon’s Echo Show.

You can also record video messages from your phone or the Hub Max to display on the Hub or in the Duo app on the recipient’s phone. I didn’t find many occasions to use this feature in my testing, but I could see it being useful when traveling in a different time zone and I want to send my kids a goodnight message. This feature works with Face Match so the Hub Max will only display messages to who they are addressed to.

With other smart displays, I’ve never found their cameras to be very useful because the video calling experience wasn’t that great and there was nothing else I could really do with the camera. I typically disable or block the cameras on them with tape, just so I don’t have to worry about it. But with the Hub Max I’m inclined to leave the camera on because it’s useful for so many other things aside from video calling. I just won’t be putting it in my bedroom.

You can listen to Spotify, Pandora, or YouTube Music directly on the Hub Max, or cast audio from an app on your phone to it. You can ask the Google Assistant for the weather, or recent sports scores, or whatever another random fact you can think of. Aside from the new camera features, the Hub Max does all of the other things the standard Nest Hub does. You can watch live YouTube TV or YouTube videos directly on the display or cast content from other apps (but still not Netflix, unfortunately) on your phone to it, just like a Chromecast plugged into your TV. The Hub Max’s bigger screen and louder speakers make watching video on it much more enjoyable than with the smaller Hub, and since I can cast most any app’s video to it from my phone, it has access to far more video sources than Amazon’s Echo Show.

You can control other smart home devices by swiping down from the top and tapping on the various options or through voice controls. If you have other Nest cameras or a Nest Hello doorbell, you can pull up the video feed from them on the Hub Max’s screen. You can have the Hub Max display a slideshow of photos in a Google Photos album or from a curated selection of images and artwork. Or you have it display a giant clock all the time.

The Hub Max has the same smart home controls as the smaller Hub.

What you can’t get on the Hub Max’s screen is a dashboard of information, such as upcoming calendar appointments, stock prices, what music is currently playing, or what smart devices are currently turned on. The Max still displays all of these things in cards that you have to tediously swipe through to see, even though its larger screen is more conducive to providing all of that info at one time and without requiring any interaction from me to see it. It feels like Google missed an opportunity to turn the Hub Max into a centralized home dashboard instead of just a smart digital photo frame and I’d love to see the Max get a home screen like the Google Assistant Ambient Mode that’s on Lenovo’s upcoming Smart Tab M8.

Unfortunately, Google hasn’t really improved the recipe function. Recipes are limited to what you can search for with your voice and if you’re looking for something specific, chances are the Hub Max won’t be able to find it. I think the kitchen is the best place for the Hub Max, since it can provide entertainment, timers, and unit conversions to help while cooking or doing the dishes — but it’s still not great for recipes.

And then there are the perennial complaints with Google’s Home devices that have yet to be addressed: you have to say “OK Google” or “Hey Google” every time you want to control the Hub Max by voice and you can’t access anything through it that’s in a G Suite account. I can’t even get the Hub Max to show me appointments in my shared Family calendar, even though that’s set up through a standard Google account.

Apple Siri vs Amazon Alexa vs Google Assistant: Tests reveal which is smartest

Voice assistants from Amazon, Apple, and Google all improve on smartphones but Google Assistant is still a top dog.

Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant are all getting better at understanding and answering questions, thanks in part to every tech giant using humans to help improve their AI.

MOBILITY

• The perfect phone: 9 features I'm dreaming of
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• The 10 best smartphones you can buy right now
• Apple Card: How to apply and how it works (ZDNet YouTube)
• Ride-sharing services guide: Taxis for the 21st century (CNET)
• The best smartphones for tech experts in 2019 (TechRepublic)

Given that voice is meant to be the next frontier of computer interfaces, investor analysts like Loup Ventures are keen to understand which company has the best interface for voice input.

Last December, the company tested Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana against 800 questions to find out which was superior. 

Google answered 88% of questions correctly, while Apple scored 75%, Alexa scored 72.5%, and Cortana came in with 63%. However, the test was on smart speakers and not smartphones.     

So Loup Ventures recently ran a similar 'IQ' test but this time focused solely on assistant capabilities on the phone and dropped Cortana because Microsoft last year decided it was no longer a competitor with Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. 

Cortana's removal and the isolation of assistants to smartphone usage haven't changed the order of the rankings. 

Google Assistant is still at the top, but now with a score of 92.9% for answering questions correctly. Siri correctly answers 83.1% of questions, while Alexa gets 79.8% correct. 

The questions are typical ones an adult might think to ask a phone, such as, "Where is the nearest coffee shop?". The questions are designed to test each system's ability to provide accurate information about local things, businesses, navigation, and information, as well as execute commands.

While the smartphone IQ test rankings are the same as the smart speaker-test, Loup Ventures analysts Gene Munster and Will Thompson, forgive Alexa's overall performance, which was negatively influenced by commands because it's an app rather than fully integrated into the device and operating system. Apple Siri performed best on commands.

"Google Assistant was the top performer in four of the five categories but fell short of Siri in the Command category again. Siri continues to prove more useful with phone-related functions like calling, texting, emailing, calendar, and music," Loup Ventures writes. 

"Both Siri and Google Assistant, which are baked into the OS of the phone, far outperformed Alexa in the Command section. Alexa lives in a third-party app, which, despite being able to send voice messages and call other Alexa devices, cannot send text messages, emails, or initiate a phone call."

Loup Ventures argues that assistants on smartphones should be treated differently from smart speakers because they're used differently and have different interfaces. For example, speakers don't have screens.    

Google Assistant fares best overall but falls short of Siri in the Command category.

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I've Been Hacked! What you need to do fast.

Target. Home Depot. The IRS. The Social Security Administration. Fitbit. LinkedIn. Time-Warner Cable. Twitter.

What do they all have in common? They've all been hacked on a major scale.

The list of companies and organizations getting hacked is diverse and long, accounting for millions upon millions of email addresses and more, stolen from customer/client databases that, as it turns out, weren't as secure as hoped.

And if you have an account with a company that's been hacked and is in the news, there's a good chance the hackers may have stolen your username and password.

And they're very happy to have it.

If a company you do business with has been hacked (their computer network has been "breached"), you need to think seriously about taking immediate measures to protect yourself. Sure, you could wait to see if there's evidence that you've been hacked. But remember—it could take weeks or months for the news to come out, and in the meantime, your accounts could be at risk.

You can't simply keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best—you must take control of the situation. And if indeed you have been hacked, you must take fast, decisive action.

Here are the most important steps that Internet Security and IT experts advise you take, if you've been hacked or suspect that an organization you do business with has been attacked:

1. Change your passwords. Make them tricky and hard to guess.

Hackers love stealing email addresses and passwords, together or individually, because they know that most people are predictable and will use the same password for different accounts. If they get only the email address, they count on people using simple passwords that are easy to crack (1234, etc.). That's why you need to change the password you used for the company that's been hacked... along with your other passwords. (Does that sound like a hassle? Well, if you don't use the same passwords for different accounts, it won't be.) By changing passwords, you might avoid having your account hacked.

2. Take a close look at the "hacked" account.

If you heard there'd been a prowler in your neighborhood, you'd be sure to double-check that all the doors in your house were locked. It would also be a good idea to check if the prowler hasn't already come into your home and taken a few things without your being aware of it! Similarly, if you hear of a major hack, take a close look at your account activity with that company, and others. If you use the same username and passwords, you could find that hackers have already gotten into other accounts. You may have to do account recovery or repair in several areas.

3. Get your account back to normal status.

Major companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft have experience responding to hackers' attacks, which means they have a process for helping you get your account back to normal if it has been compromised.

If there HAS been a problem, they'll notify you by email and tell you what to do. Just BE SURE of two things:

• There has been a documented attack.
• The persons reaching out to you via email are true with the company! Verify that everything is legitimate before proceeding.

4. Tell friends and family you've been hacked.

You're not looking for sympathy here or sharing bad news—you're alerting people you communicate with that your email account has been hacked and that the hacker may send strange messages in your name, looking for more victims. Your message to friends should simply be, "Keep your eyes open and your guard up if you see suspicious emails from me!"

5. Keep an eye on your financial or credit accounts.

It happens all the time. Hackers get just enough information to hack into a credit or debit card account to make fraudulent purchases (usually online) where they can get away with it. Hopefully, your bank has systems in place to track suspicious activity. You can do your part by opening up your at-risk accounts and checking your account activity yourself. You'll know better than anyone if a purchase was yours or authorized by you or not.

6. Scan your computer for viruses and malware.

If you believe hackers have somehow gotten into your email account, you need to find out if they've gotten into your computer with malware (dangerous software that can take over your computer). You'll want to run a security scan of your computer using a leading antivirus program and malware detector, which can help you find and eliminate any programs lurking on your hard drive, waiting to do more damage.

7. Reinstall your operating system and backup data.

If you suffered a legitimate hack on your system, you may want to consider reinstalling your operating system, wiping your hard drive clean and retrieving your backup files. Unless you're technically savvy and comfortable with the idea, you may want to get help from an IT professional—someone you trust. Because the last thing you want is to transfer damaged files from an infected PC or hard drive to a new one.

Back to normal. Maybe.

Those are the steps you'll need to take if you suspect or know that your computer or personal information has been compromised. Hopefully, you've been able to avoid that drama so far.

To continue staying safe, it's important to break old habits that put you at risk and develop new practices, many of them simple steps. You can keep hackers out of your life by making it harder for them to find a way in and shoring up your defenses when you hear that they're hard at work.

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