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on January 23, 2017
The camera is only useful for the first 30 days, after that you are required to subscribe to the nest aware subscription for a minimum of $10 a month. If you don't subscribe all you get is a motion alert whenever something moves but unless you go into the app right away and watch live all you get is a pictures of the last 3 hours no video. All in all the camera paired with the app is about as useful as the ones you hang on trees to snap pictures of the wildlife
on December 12, 2016
Edit: 02/14/2016. The problems below still persist after the recent iOS Nest app update. It has been months since I bought them in November 2016 and they still have not resolved this basic issue. I very much regret buying four of these expensive cameras.
Edit: 04/02/2017. Chatted with Nest support about my snapshot history for the last three hours being totally blank (I don’t have a NestAware subscription and am limited to these snapshots). This has happened quite often since getting these cameras. I know there should be activity there. They tried some things like remotely resetting my camera which didn’t make much difference. During the chat with them, my history will suddenly be viewable on the iPhone. Then a few minutes later, it will be totally blank. This is true for multiple cameras. This gives me zero confidence that I’ll be able to view my history in a timely fashion in the event of an emergency. Also doesn't encourage me to give them any money for NestAware when I'm so often disappointed with how things work as it is.
Edit: 04/14/2017. Tried getting notifications working again as I periodically do since my original bad support experience in late 2016. The menus have changed slightly in the iPhone app and on the website which makes me think they attempted to improve notifications. Long story short...they still don't work. After walking around in front of the camera on and off for a half hour (alerts set to "only when away" and I currently have it set to Away), I finally got one single email to come in SEVEN MINUTES AFTER THE MOTION ACTIVITY EVENT. This is with me on wifi and monitoring my (push) email, so the problem definitely is with Nest and not my email. Ugh. Sigh sigh sigh. Please see my original review below for even more reasons not to invest in Nest. Will attempt to get notifications working again in a couple months. Not at all reliable now.
Original Review: 2+ weeks of dealing with Nest senior level support has left me beyond frustrated.
I'm getting notifications for activity when I'm home despite "only when no one's home" being enabled in settings.
After jumping through a ton of troubleshooting hoops and ultimately creating an entire new Nest account, the problem persists.
Got a final phone call today after the "engineers reviewed my case" and senior support passed along the word from up top that the engineers say I need to have location services on for my issue to be resolved (which does not have anything to do with my problem as I've described it countless times).
After explaining (for the 10th time) that I have the problem with location services both on and off, he proceeded to tell me that "it's a known issue and they're working on it."
I bought FOUR of these expensive cameras for several reason but notification support was a huge one, and now I've been asked to "keep an eye on updates" for an indeterminate time to see if it is fixed. (Also found out after buying them that notifications only show up ONCE every 30-minute interval for each camera, which is totally unacceptable.)
Except for this frustrating experience, the iOS and web apps are pretty good. But that does not ameliorate all of the other issues here and I refuse to rate the app more than one star until this is fixed. Will update this review if something changes.
PS: What you're viewing "live" on your cameras is sometimes 5-10 seconds delayed. I have fast internet with excellent wifi. This is ridiculous. Does not make me want to pay the monthly subscription for Nest Aware when they can't even get free functionality performing well.
PPS: My cameras go "offline" sporadically quite often. There's nothing else I can do to optimize their location or wifi settings. All cameras are within 10-15 feet of an 802.11ac wifi router. The one that goes offline most is actually about 5 feet from the router. I wish I had the option to plug in a cat6 ethernet cable, but it's wifi only. I'm at a loss with this product.
Edit: 04/02/2017. Chatted with Nest support about my snapshot history for the last three hours being totally blank (I don’t have a NestAware subscription and am limited to these snapshots). This has happened quite often since getting these cameras. I know there should be activity there. They tried some things like remotely resetting my camera which didn’t make much difference. During the chat with them, my history will suddenly be viewable on the iPhone. Then a few minutes later, it will be totally blank. This is true for multiple cameras. This gives me zero confidence that I’ll be able to view my history in a timely fashion in the event of an emergency. Also doesn't encourage me to give them any money for NestAware when I'm so often disappointed with how things work as it is.
Edit: 04/14/2017. Tried getting notifications working again as I periodically do since my original bad support experience in late 2016. The menus have changed slightly in the iPhone app and on the website which makes me think they attempted to improve notifications. Long story short...they still don't work. After walking around in front of the camera on and off for a half hour (alerts set to "only when away" and I currently have it set to Away), I finally got one single email to come in SEVEN MINUTES AFTER THE MOTION ACTIVITY EVENT. This is with me on wifi and monitoring my (push) email, so the problem definitely is with Nest and not my email. Ugh. Sigh sigh sigh. Please see my original review below for even more reasons not to invest in Nest. Will attempt to get notifications working again in a couple months. Not at all reliable now.
Original Review: 2+ weeks of dealing with Nest senior level support has left me beyond frustrated.
I'm getting notifications for activity when I'm home despite "only when no one's home" being enabled in settings.
After jumping through a ton of troubleshooting hoops and ultimately creating an entire new Nest account, the problem persists.
Got a final phone call today after the "engineers reviewed my case" and senior support passed along the word from up top that the engineers say I need to have location services on for my issue to be resolved (which does not have anything to do with my problem as I've described it countless times).
After explaining (for the 10th time) that I have the problem with location services both on and off, he proceeded to tell me that "it's a known issue and they're working on it."
I bought FOUR of these expensive cameras for several reason but notification support was a huge one, and now I've been asked to "keep an eye on updates" for an indeterminate time to see if it is fixed. (Also found out after buying them that notifications only show up ONCE every 30-minute interval for each camera, which is totally unacceptable.)
Except for this frustrating experience, the iOS and web apps are pretty good. But that does not ameliorate all of the other issues here and I refuse to rate the app more than one star until this is fixed. Will update this review if something changes.
PS: What you're viewing "live" on your cameras is sometimes 5-10 seconds delayed. I have fast internet with excellent wifi. This is ridiculous. Does not make me want to pay the monthly subscription for Nest Aware when they can't even get free functionality performing well.
PPS: My cameras go "offline" sporadically quite often. There's nothing else I can do to optimize their location or wifi settings. All cameras are within 10-15 feet of an 802.11ac wifi router. The one that goes offline most is actually about 5 feet from the router. I wish I had the option to plug in a cat6 ethernet cable, but it's wifi only. I'm at a loss with this product.
on May 22, 2017
CONS:
Software is Geo-blocked. While the camera & software works, they are geoblocking setting your home address. You have to first put in a US based address, then move the pin on the map to your real location. I really do not understand why they are doing this.
NestAware starts getting very expensive when you start adding more cameras ($150 a year for each additional camera)
You can not use this easily with your own NVR.I haven't been able to get it to work with QNAP Surveillance Station, but it sort of works with TinyCam on Android.
PROS:
High-quality software and website. I have tried a few different cameras and Nest really shines here. You can tell this is a high-end solution compared to others like Samsung. The Samsung App is very clunky compared to Nest.
Software is Geo-blocked. While the camera & software works, they are geoblocking setting your home address. You have to first put in a US based address, then move the pin on the map to your real location. I really do not understand why they are doing this.
NestAware starts getting very expensive when you start adding more cameras ($150 a year for each additional camera)
You can not use this easily with your own NVR.I haven't been able to get it to work with QNAP Surveillance Station, but it sort of works with TinyCam on Android.
PROS:
High-quality software and website. I have tried a few different cameras and Nest really shines here. You can tell this is a high-end solution compared to others like Samsung. The Samsung App is very clunky compared to Nest.
on June 7, 2017
We got the Indoor security camera after first buying the Outdoor camera and using it for a couple of weeks. Both worked brilliantly. I knew anytime someone was around my front door or when my dogs were up to anything. The images are really nice. The only funky thing we've noticed is that you can make it through the front door and entry without the camera picking up an image, if you're quick enough (without even trying). The alerts worked so well and we liked all of the options with the trial period so much that we bought the subscription after only a few days of the trial expiring because we missed the alerts and - to be honest - knowing when our puppies were up and about with video clips. Also, my husband comes home to the pups lunch and I would get the alert and chat with him and the pups. I knew when my husband and daughter got home and could have a quick chat using the microphone. It made being gone all day a little easier.
Unfortunately, once we actually paid for a year of service... we get zero alerts. All the things I loved about the trial, don't work. I mean, I can see the images when my dogs move, but I have to go into it to see if anything's going on. I get ZERO alerts now.
We've reset them. We've changed and tweaked every setting. Nothing matters.
To be fair, I do see the video clips when I go into Nest to look at them, I just don't get a single alert when something happens to create those clips.
Why does it matter? Here's why -
We got it because we "crate" our dogs, otherwise, one of our dogs can be incredibly destructive. The pups are very happy to have their treat and be crated, but our little one disagrees with the whole mess and is pretty clever about busting them all out on occasion. When he does that, my husband can switch his day around and come home to re-crate them. Our dog has cost us hundreds of dollars of damage - not to mention the crap she'll eat if she's unsupervised. Without alerts, I have no way of knowing when my escape artist busts them out.
One last complaint: During the trial, I set the cameras to go on and off as needed using their different options when using the trial - they all worked. My favorite was the Home/Away feature. If you're home, the cameras turn off. It wasn't perfect, even on the trial, but now that we've paid, they either go off and stay off or never turn off. I'll wake up at 5am and realize I'm staring into a live camera.
My cameras were $199 each and if they worked as well as it did during the trial, I'd be okay with the subscription price. But honestly - I will think twice about spending another $100/$150+ to renew the subscriptions.
Without the subscription the cameras still work and you can go in and see live, but it only takes snapshots with movement.
Summary:
The cameras work great - subscription - not so much. (Full disclosure: I haven't contacted customer service, yet)
**Edit: My notifications were set for push notifications without mail notifications. After playing with it - I turned mail notifications back on and suddenly the push notifications are working again. Clearly this is bugged, but at least it's a way to turn it back on. - changed from 3 to 4 stars since it's working - even if notifications are buggy.
Also - the "Home Away" part - rarely works. Which is why we turned off the email portion to begin with. We've come up with a solution that works for us - M-F we're sort of set hours - on the weekends - we just turn it off and on as needed. I wish the Home Away worked as advertised.
Unfortunately, once we actually paid for a year of service... we get zero alerts. All the things I loved about the trial, don't work. I mean, I can see the images when my dogs move, but I have to go into it to see if anything's going on. I get ZERO alerts now.
We've reset them. We've changed and tweaked every setting. Nothing matters.
To be fair, I do see the video clips when I go into Nest to look at them, I just don't get a single alert when something happens to create those clips.
Why does it matter? Here's why -
We got it because we "crate" our dogs, otherwise, one of our dogs can be incredibly destructive. The pups are very happy to have their treat and be crated, but our little one disagrees with the whole mess and is pretty clever about busting them all out on occasion. When he does that, my husband can switch his day around and come home to re-crate them. Our dog has cost us hundreds of dollars of damage - not to mention the crap she'll eat if she's unsupervised. Without alerts, I have no way of knowing when my escape artist busts them out.
One last complaint: During the trial, I set the cameras to go on and off as needed using their different options when using the trial - they all worked. My favorite was the Home/Away feature. If you're home, the cameras turn off. It wasn't perfect, even on the trial, but now that we've paid, they either go off and stay off or never turn off. I'll wake up at 5am and realize I'm staring into a live camera.
My cameras were $199 each and if they worked as well as it did during the trial, I'd be okay with the subscription price. But honestly - I will think twice about spending another $100/$150+ to renew the subscriptions.
Without the subscription the cameras still work and you can go in and see live, but it only takes snapshots with movement.
Summary:
The cameras work great - subscription - not so much. (Full disclosure: I haven't contacted customer service, yet)
**Edit: My notifications were set for push notifications without mail notifications. After playing with it - I turned mail notifications back on and suddenly the push notifications are working again. Clearly this is bugged, but at least it's a way to turn it back on. - changed from 3 to 4 stars since it's working - even if notifications are buggy.
Also - the "Home Away" part - rarely works. Which is why we turned off the email portion to begin with. We've come up with a solution that works for us - M-F we're sort of set hours - on the weekends - we just turn it off and on as needed. I wish the Home Away worked as advertised.
on October 18, 2015
Ended up returning this item after a few weeks of use. Key points that led to my return:
1) Watermark logo on images blocked robber's face. My car was burgled; caught it on camera, robber walk right at the camera... into the watermark. Whoops.
2) Not that easy to set up. No where near the one minute setup they claim.
3) All traffic goes through their Amazon EC2 instances. EC2 went down one morning, taking the camera down with it. I couldn't access video on a camera 25 feet away from me...
4) On the day that EC2 went down, Nest sent me an email saying that I would lose my video history unless I paid for a $10/month subscription. Bad timing... whoops. Sorry Nest, $500+ for this camera over a 3 year period is really not worth it.
5) Camera overheated and stopped working in direct sunlight.
6) No local storage.
Things I liked about this camera:
1) Fantastic streaming quality (1080). The quality of the recorded history seemed to not be as good. Great night vision.
2) Nice mobile app. Better than almost all the other ones I've seen, not perfect, but still very good.
3) Nice footprint.
If they had dropped the subscription price to $5/month, I would have considered keeping it. However, the real downside of this camera seems to be bad product decisions. The hardware is fantastic, the software is good, it's the overall product that isn't good. Case in point - the watermark on the image screams product manager ego, at the expense of usability.
1) Watermark logo on images blocked robber's face. My car was burgled; caught it on camera, robber walk right at the camera... into the watermark. Whoops.
2) Not that easy to set up. No where near the one minute setup they claim.
3) All traffic goes through their Amazon EC2 instances. EC2 went down one morning, taking the camera down with it. I couldn't access video on a camera 25 feet away from me...
4) On the day that EC2 went down, Nest sent me an email saying that I would lose my video history unless I paid for a $10/month subscription. Bad timing... whoops. Sorry Nest, $500+ for this camera over a 3 year period is really not worth it.
5) Camera overheated and stopped working in direct sunlight.
6) No local storage.
Things I liked about this camera:
1) Fantastic streaming quality (1080). The quality of the recorded history seemed to not be as good. Great night vision.
2) Nice mobile app. Better than almost all the other ones I've seen, not perfect, but still very good.
3) Nice footprint.
If they had dropped the subscription price to $5/month, I would have considered keeping it. However, the real downside of this camera seems to be bad product decisions. The hardware is fantastic, the software is good, it's the overall product that isn't good. Case in point - the watermark on the image screams product manager ego, at the expense of usability.
on February 15, 2016
I bought these to keep an eye on a property that I own but don't live at. It took a bit of fiddling, but at the moment I have 5 cameras, all of which work pretty well. Some of the initial problems I ran into were not down to the cameras, but the conditions at the location where I installed them. First, I was hoping to be able to get away with a low-bandwidth/low-cost internet package from my cable company to support the cameras, but this wasn't possible. At a bandwidth requirement of ~200Kbps per camera, i had to upgrade to an internet package that gave me more bandwidth. The second issue I ran into was that I was getting poor signal to the cameras from the wifi router. Again, this is no fault of the cameras, but due to the fact that the house has plaster walls with metal mesh lath, which degrades the wifi signal across rooms much more than sheetrock walls. This was causing some of the cameras to constantly lose their connection. **Protip: You can use an Android phone (not an iPhone) with a wifi analyzer app to check the signal strength at your cameras' locations.
Once the bandwidth issue was resolved, I determined that I needed a wifi extender to get the wifi signal to reach the cameras located far away from the wifi router (again, the signal degradation was mostly due to the plaster walls in the house). Once the extender was up and running and the cameras getting a strong signal, I haven't had a single problem with them disconnecting.
The image quality is fairly good. Although I do have to say that I have one camera pointing out a window. There is a streetlight across the street, and the streetlight alone provides enough light that I have a fairly good view even with Night Vision off.
I was also able to set up activity zones so that the camera looking out the window only notifies me when there is activity in my yard and driveway, but not when a car drives by on the street. Nice.
I do agree with reviewers that the cameras do get quite hot. Not hot enough to burn, but enough that I made sure there was plenty of room for air circulate around it. Not sure I'd want to put it anywhere where it'd be cramped.
So far so good, at least for my purposes, which admittedly are probably different than most people's who use it in their homes.
Once the bandwidth issue was resolved, I determined that I needed a wifi extender to get the wifi signal to reach the cameras located far away from the wifi router (again, the signal degradation was mostly due to the plaster walls in the house). Once the extender was up and running and the cameras getting a strong signal, I haven't had a single problem with them disconnecting.
The image quality is fairly good. Although I do have to say that I have one camera pointing out a window. There is a streetlight across the street, and the streetlight alone provides enough light that I have a fairly good view even with Night Vision off.
I was also able to set up activity zones so that the camera looking out the window only notifies me when there is activity in my yard and driveway, but not when a car drives by on the street. Nice.
I do agree with reviewers that the cameras do get quite hot. Not hot enough to burn, but enough that I made sure there was plenty of room for air circulate around it. Not sure I'd want to put it anywhere where it'd be cramped.
So far so good, at least for my purposes, which admittedly are probably different than most people's who use it in their homes.
on September 3, 2015
I don't often post reviews but after my experience with this product I felt compelled to. First off, the hardware is great, when the nest service is working and I can actually view the camera stream the picture is great, especially the night vision. The field of view is excellent and the sound monitoring is clear. From that functionality I couldn't be happier.
All that, however, is crippled by the Nest web service that the camera relies on. The camera stream goes directly to the Nest web service and the only way to view it is to log into their service, either through an app or the web site. This means that all your bandwidth usage is doubled as the video has to go out and then come back in. While not the end of the world, I frequently experience buffering and sometimes lose the stream entirely and have to reload the app. I have 75 Mbs down and 15 Mbs up so it's clearly not my connection that is the problem. In addition the camera is in the next room, probably a total of 10 feet through dry wall from my router so it's not a wireless signal issue.
Even that is not the end of the world for this product and I would still have given it 4 stars but what really puts the nail in the coffin of usefulness is that if their web service goes down, which I've now seen happens twice in the 3 weeks that I've been using the product the camera is completely useless. Which is great when you're using it as a baby monitor due to all the great reviews (which incidentally were really for the Dropcam) and it cuts out at midnight. What makes it even better is that there is a Nest service status on their support page and even though this outage made my camera useless for at least 2 hours(I don't know exactly how long as I eventually moved the kid and went back to sleep) they never had a status of anything other than normal. The support person I talked to even admitted that they had an issue but he thought it was resolved. Then back tracked that maybe they were still having issues when we couldn't get the camera to work and that I should call back if it's still not working in a couple of hours.
Long story short. The hardware and functionality are great which is saving this review from being a 1 star but they are layered on top of a very substandard cloud service which makes it useless when it goes down.
All that, however, is crippled by the Nest web service that the camera relies on. The camera stream goes directly to the Nest web service and the only way to view it is to log into their service, either through an app or the web site. This means that all your bandwidth usage is doubled as the video has to go out and then come back in. While not the end of the world, I frequently experience buffering and sometimes lose the stream entirely and have to reload the app. I have 75 Mbs down and 15 Mbs up so it's clearly not my connection that is the problem. In addition the camera is in the next room, probably a total of 10 feet through dry wall from my router so it's not a wireless signal issue.
Even that is not the end of the world for this product and I would still have given it 4 stars but what really puts the nail in the coffin of usefulness is that if their web service goes down, which I've now seen happens twice in the 3 weeks that I've been using the product the camera is completely useless. Which is great when you're using it as a baby monitor due to all the great reviews (which incidentally were really for the Dropcam) and it cuts out at midnight. What makes it even better is that there is a Nest service status on their support page and even though this outage made my camera useless for at least 2 hours(I don't know exactly how long as I eventually moved the kid and went back to sleep) they never had a status of anything other than normal. The support person I talked to even admitted that they had an issue but he thought it was resolved. Then back tracked that maybe they were still having issues when we couldn't get the camera to work and that I should call back if it's still not working in a couple of hours.
Long story short. The hardware and functionality are great which is saving this review from being a 1 star but they are layered on top of a very substandard cloud service which makes it useless when it goes down.
on October 20, 2016
I have two Nest cams, both are constantly losing wifi signal - several times a day, every single day. I use it as my baby monitor and wake up in the middle of the night only to realize my camera has been off line for hours. My parents as well as several friends also have Nest cams and we all have the same problem. I don't recommend this product to anyone, it is unreliable.
on November 27, 2016
Bought 3 and returned them today, Nest aware is the sole reason. 3 cameras would cost me 200/year. The basic option is too basic. Only 3 hours to store photos? It's like you're pushing us to use the Nest Aware. A flight from LA to NY is more than 3 hours, if something happens during the flight I wouldn't have a clue. Most cams out there at least offer 24 hr service. OR you can offer a cheaper alternative. Offer 3 days instead of 10 days for much cheaper.
