Nest Cam review - beautifully simple, but simply expensive

Nest, the smart home company behind the original smart thermostat and the smartphone-connected Protect smoke alarms, bought IP camera company Dropcam last year, but has waited until now to launch its first Nest-branded camera. The Nest Cam is an evolution of the existing Dropcam camera, built to slot into Nest’s existing range of smart home equipment.

The camera itself is incredibly simple, with a clean and stylish design that you won’t mind leaving on display. The 1080p camera sensor sits on top of an articulated stem for easy adjustment, with a magnetic base that lets you fix it vertically to a fridge or kitchen appliance without having to break out any screws. A tripod thread in the bottom will let you fix it just about anywhere else as well.

You only need to connect the power adaptor to get the Nest Cam online, as setup is handled entirely through the iOS and Android companion apps. There’s no need to plug a base station into your router, as the camera connects to your existing Wi-Fi connection. When adding a new Nest product through the app, you use your smartphone’s camera to scan the QR code on the back of each device. Your phone then connects to the Cam directly, letting you add your router's Wi-Fi details.

The smartphone apps let you adjust settings, change video quality and set recording schedules for when you’re home and don’t need the camera to record, but the most useful function is live view. You can get a live feed from your camera virtually anywhere you have mobile phone reception, and the frame rate stays remarkably high even on 3G. You can toggle between 1080p and 720p recording, but image quality, particularly in faces, remains excellent at the lower quality setting.

With all your footage uploaded to the cloud, you don’t have to worry about someone stealing the camera and leaving you with no way to identify them. Placing the camera in a prominent position should help positively identify any would-be intruders, and thankfully picture quality remains high at night on account of the infrared night vision LEDs. The image quality is among the best we've seen from an IP camera - a daytime clip is available here.

The camera also has an integrated microphone and speaker, which you can use to listen in through the app or speak using your smartphone’s microphone. There’s naturally a second or so of delay between you speaking and the sound being produced by the camera, but it’s ideal if you want to use a Nest Cam for keeping an eye on your pets. A quick “get down” will let your dog know it’s not OK to take over the sofa while you’re at work.

The web interface is almost identical to the smartphone app, too, making it easy to move between the two. There’s nothing in one that isn’t also available in the other, so you don’t miss out if you only use the smartphone app. You’ll definitely want to set up a schedule, however; when we first installed the camera in a hallway we would get hundreds of notifications a day. Setting the camera to only record motion at night should prevent any false alarms.

Nest Cam plays nicely with other Nest products, as you would expect. If your Protect alarm detects smoke, Cam automatically starts recording while the alarm sends an alert notification to your smartphone. Switching your Thermostat to the ‘Away’ mode will automatically turn on the camera, and returning to ‘Home’ mode will deactivate it again so you don’t need to worry about triggering a movement notification yourself when walking around the home. However, that’s it as far as smart home integration goes. Both Protect and the Thermostat talk to other devices using the IFTTT service but the Nest Cam is a strictly standalone product. You can toggle Home and Away functions from within the smartphone app, even if you don’t have a Nest Thermostat, but notifications still came through during Home hours – for the time being schedules seem to be the best way to prevent false alerts.

Unfortunately, Nest Cam is restricted by its payment model. At £159 for a single camera it isn't exactly cheap to begin with, but you'll then need to sign up to a subscription for either 10-day or 30-day video history. Without a subscription, you essentially get live feed video and not a lot else. You can’t even save your clips without a subscription, and even then only up to three hours’ worth. These get deleted automatically once their limited lifespan expires. There's no local backup, with everything getting pushed to the cloud.

Ten days of footage should be more than enough for most people, especially if you’re only planning to buy a single camera, but you'll have to pay £80 annually for the service. This then lets you use more advanced features like activity zone monitoring and face-detecting motion sensing to avoid false alerts, but it feels stingy to keep such services behind a paywall. If you plan on going away for longer periods of time, you'll need to invest in the £240 30-day backup plan; this is very expensive compared to Netgear's Arlo, which only costs £64 a year for 30-day backups.

Conclusion

Nest Cam is a brilliantly simple way to add a security camera to your home. It comes into its own if you have other Nest products already installed, but even as a stand-alone camera the app is easy to use and picture quality is superb. You don’t need to add a base station to your router, the attractive design means you don’t have to hide it out of sight and at £159 it’s not too expensive either. However, the Nest Aware pricing model is rather costly, and without one the camera is rather limited in terms of advanced features. It might cost more, but the battery-powered Netgear Arlo cameras currently include more modes and settings out of the box, plus a cheaper subscription model.