When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Google mounts a major comeback in the smart home space with an excellent video doorbell, but you'll need to pay to play. The Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3 gen) is an excellent home security device, and you don't need to pay for a subscription to get a limited number of event recordings. Gemini, meanwhile, is nothing short of amazing, but you will need an expensive subscription to avail yourself of it. Prior to announcing its third-generation Nest Doorbell--along with its other two new security cameras in early October--Google had us thinking it had lost interest in the smart home.

The Google Home app has seen a host of small improvements over the last few months to enhance stability and polish. However, Google says with this new update, you can expect to see 70 percent faster startup with the app and 80 percent fewer crashes. There are battery life and memory optimizations, and scrubbing through the camera is six times smoother. The Home app is designed to be used easily one-handed, and you can use more gestures, such as swiping down to enter a camera view or swiping up to back out. You now get preview images from the last event before the live view loads, the ability to swipe between timeline and events, double-tap to fast forward or rewind, and better notifications with a static thumbnail expandable to a large animated preview. Google says the merger of features and devices from the old Nest app is now complete, and folks should be able to transition seamlessly, though the legacy app won't be disappearing yet.

The big smart home manufacturers have been leaking like sieves as of late, giving us juicy early previews of their super-secret upcoming releases. Philips Hue recently fell victim to its own leak that revealed its entire fall product lineup, and now Google appears to have unwittingly shared images of its new Nest cam hardware. First, a quick recap: Google had already teased--intentionally--a new Gemini smart speaker during its Pixel event a couple of weeks back, and just days ago it promised an upcoming Google Home update on October 1, complete with a partial image of what appears to be a new Nest camera. Instead, it seems Google may have inadvertently left images of its new Nest hardware in the Google Home app following a recent update. The images, which were spotted by Android Authority and appear to have been subsequently yanked from the app, don't reveal anything startlingly new about the new Nest cams, aside from the fact that they exist.

Those who've been in the market for a video doorbell to add to their array of smart home devices may want to check out a sale on some options from Google Nest. A sale has dropped the prices of Nest video doorbells by 28 percent. That means the second-gen Nest Doorbell Wired has dropped to $130, which is a record low for that model. Nest's latest wired doorbell works with both Google Assistant- and Amazon Alexa-enabled devices. The latest iteration of the device can continuously record footage for up to 10 days at a time if you have a Nest Aware Plus subscription. A Nest Aware subscription includes 30 days of event video history and a familiar face detection function.

Google has launched Nest's second-generation wired doorbell for those who don't want to monitor their device's battery levels or to worry about spotty WiFi. The device is around 30 percent smaller than its battery-powered counterpart and could better fit smaller and narrower spaces. Google said it spent a lot of time fine-tuning this model, testing it in various conditions to ensure the images it produces are clear and identifiable and giving it HDR support to capture more details. It was also able eliminate the distorted fish-eye effect that's typical in footage seen from doorbell cameras. Apparently, DXOMark, a website known for assessing smartphone lenses and cameras, consider the device the best doorbell camera it has tested in terms of image quality.

Google will be taking the wraps off its Pixel 7 smartphone and Pixel Watch smartwatch at its Made by Google event in New York City later this week, but today, Google-owned Nest is sharing a few new products and updates in the company's smart-home ecosystem--from a new Nest Wifi Pro router with Wi-Fi 6E support to a redesigned Google Home app. Last year, Nest debuted a second-generation Nest Doorbell (Battery), a battery-powered video doorbell. Now, it's time for a second-gen wired version, for those who don't want to worry about their doorbell running out of juice. It looks quite similar and has similar specs but is 30 percent smaller. There's 24/7 recording support, and it stores three hours of important events in its local memory in case your Wi-Fi goes out. The new doorbell's camera isn't as high-resolution as the original Nest Doorbell, with a 960 x 1,280-pixel resolution, but it's the HDR support that takes the camera quality a step further--it'll be able to handle bright lights and better expose your footage.

The smart home ecosystem is getting a little more integrated: Google just updated its Amazon Alexa Skill to work on its latest Nest cameras. So if you already own a variety of Nest and Alexa devices, they'll work together more seamlessly moving forward. Now, you can stream live feeds from your Nest cameras, doorbells and other devices to anything from your Amazon Fire TV to any Echo device. Amazon made a similar gesture to open up its own smart home ecosystem last month, when it announced that its doorbells and security cameras would work with Google Nest, Ring, Abode and other third-party devices. Amazon's Ring doorbell already works with Google Home and Apple Homekit.

The scariest part of Halloween this year could be how much we're spending on it. American's are shelling out more than $10 billion – a whopping two billion dollars more than in 2020. We're buying up everything from "Squid Game" costumes and candy corn – both top Halloween searches via Google – to TikTok-trendy must-haves like vintage decorations, scary movies and even good old fashioned snail-mail greeting cards. If the high cost of it all is more trick than treat for you, here are several ways to turn your already smart home into a spook-tacularly genius haunted house. Protect your kids' privacy: Google tool lets minors pull images of themselves from search results An estimated one in every fourpeople in America own a smart speaker and 70% of those are Amazon Echo devices, according to analytics site eMarketer.

Google is feeling the smart home heat. Shortly after Amazon announced its dirt-cheap $50 Blink video doorbell, Nest VP Rishi Chandra announced that Google also has a competing second-generation Nest Doorbell coming next year. And unlike the recently launched battery-powered Nest Doorbell, the new device will be hardwired like the original Nest Hello. That opens the door for 24/7 video recording, something the battery-powered cameras can't handle due to thermal issues (plus you'd likely have to recharge them often). Chandra also says Google plans to launch a web view for the Home app next year as well, which will allow you to control cameras and other devices from your computer.

It's been three years since Google launched the Nest Hello, a wired video doorbell with facial recognition that helped set the standard for smart doorbells. In that time, many competitors have appeared, but few have come close to the quality and reliability of that device. The Nest Doorbell (battery) is a Google-made video doorbell that can run on battery power (it can also operate on wired power, if you have that infrastructure and wish to connect it to your existing doorbell chime). In our tests the device performed excellently, didn't give any problems, and proved itself to be a worthy sister device to the original Nest Hello. A large, round black circle with a camera in its center is at the top of the new Nest doorbell. A small LED below that indicates when the camera is recording or processing video.