Google Nest Hub review: so much more than a digital photo frame

The Google Nest Hub (and its bigger brother, the Nest Hub Max) sits at the center of Google's Smart Home system. Linked to its Google Assistant, it can play music, stream YouTube videos, tell you jokes, and answer your questions about life, the universe and everything. And when it's not doing any of that, it can display your photographs, just like a dedicated digital photo frame.

For this review, I'll be focusing primarily on its capabilities to display your photos, but in the same way that you could use an iPad simply to display images, this is a powerful multimedia device with a (reasonably) intelligent assistant, and its ability to act as a photo frame is just one of its many party tricks.

Google Nest Hub: Specifications

Google Nest Hub: Price

There are two versions of the Google Nest Hub. The standard version is in its second generation and has a 7-inch display with a 1024 x 600-pixel resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio at a list price of $99.99 / £89.99 / AU$149. There's also a larger 10-inch version, the Google Nest Hub Max, in which the resolution increases to 1280 x 800 pixels and aspect ratio becomes a slightly deeper 16:10, but the price leaps up to $229 / £219 / AU$349.

To be fair the Max also adds a video camera for full video call functionality and has a far beefier speaker system, but even so, you're paying a lot more for a relatively small increase in screen real estate.

Google Nest Hub: Design & Handling

The Google Nest Hub comes in a variety of 'neutral' colors Chalk, Charcoal, Sand, and Mist, to match your home decor. These colors are limited to its stand, which is mostly hidden, and the screen itself is surrounded by a shiny white bezel that's curved at the corners. It doesn't look too much like a photo frame, but more like a tablet on its side.

The stand is chunky and there's little danger of the frame toppling over. It houses a decent speaker assembly that offers much better audio quality than the tinny ones found in most dedicated photo frames. The stand is fixed in place and so the screen is permanently in horizontal orientation, thus it is far better at displaying images shot in landscape rather than portrait mode.

The screen is touchscreen and allows a variety of swipes to move back and forth through images and to select options, but most of the device's functionality is controlled by your voice. Around the back there are a pair of volume up and down controls, but also a switch to disable the microphone for when you don't want Google to be eavesdropping on your every word.

There's no provision for plugging in USB sticks or memory cards; all images need to be stored in the Google Photos app, which gives you 15GB of storage for free and should be more than enough if you're simply using it to get selected photos onto the frame. However, there's the option to pay for a subscription if you're going to use it as your main way of storing images.

Google Nest Hub: Performance

The spec sheet shows that the Nest Hub has 2GB of memory, but this isn't for photo storage and the device needs to be linked to a Google account to have any decent functionality. You have to use the Google Photos app if you want to use it as a photo frame. The Google Photos app can be downloaded to Apple and Android devices, and links to the host phone's photo library, enabling you to copy images into your Google Photos storage. You can also download a version of the Google Photos app onto your computer, which is handy for photographers who prefer to use a dedicated camera rather than their phone to take pictures, and there's a web-based version too, enabling you to upload images without first installing a full application.

You'll also need to use the Google Home app – but this is a requirement for using much of the Google Nest Hub's other functionality, such as setting up music and video streaming services, connecting to other Nest devices or products such as TVs, and so on.

The easiest way to get started, once you've done the basics of setting up your Nest Hub via the Google Home app, is to simply say, "Hey Google, set up a photo frame" or similar, and the Google Assistant springs into action, presenting you with options to create a slideshow using Google Photos, use an art gallery of curated images, or keep to its default of a full-screen clock.

I did find that getting things set up initially meant a fair bit of hopping between the Nest Hub itself and the Google Photos and Google Home apps, but once they're all talking to one another then things become fairly straightforward. The first step is to grant Google Photos access to your phone's photo library, and then set up an album, which you can populate with images simply by tapping them on a grid. Back on the Google Nest Hub, you can select the album (or albums) from which you wish to display images.

To control how images are displayed, you need to use the Google Home app or do this directly on the Nest Hub itself. Here you can decide to have information such as time and weather overlaid onto images, the duration each photo is displayed for, and whether to display portrait images in pairs (which looks best as otherwise single images are hemmed in by unsightly borders). Images are cropped automatically, and you have no control over this. Luckily, Google seemed to make sensible decisions on how it cropped the images I uploaded. Other users linked to the Google Nest Hub can also create albums from their own phone libraries to be added to the display.

The 7-inch display is hardly a showstopper, displaying images more akin in size to a regular photo print rather than an enlargement. But despite the screen only having a 1024 x 600-pixel resolution, images are displayed brightly and crisply, as the small screen size results in a decent 170ppi density. The display brightness automatically dims to suit the ambient lighting, which is a nice touch. It's a tough device designed for busy environments such as kitchens, and the protective clear plastic that encases the screen is quite reflective.

Google Nest Hub: Verdict

It's best to think of the digital photo frame abilities of the Google Nest Hub as a nice extra, rather than its primary function. The 7-inch screen is much smaller than most dedicated photo frames but it is nevertheless bright and punchy and the pictures look good – just a bit small. It's a bit of a pain to set up initially, with a lot of hopping between apps required, but that's soon forgotten once you've got it working.

There are other limitations. It can only be set in landscape orientation, and you don't have any control over the way images are cropped. But in the same way that phones aren't the best cameras but are used to take the most pictures, the beauty of the Goole Nest Hub as a photo frame is that it's a highly practical device that's designed to take the knocks and shocks of busy environments such as kitchens, rather than tucked safely away on a shelf, and as such will probably be used to view more photos day to day.

And it is incredibly good value, considering everything else it does, from steaming music and video, tackling pretty much any questions you might throw at it, and sitting at the heart of a smart home system to control satellite speakers, turn down the lighting, show who's at the door, and even change channels on your TV.

Alternatives

Aeezo Portrait
The Google Nest Hub is cheap, but the Aeezo is even cheaper, can be used in portrait orientation, and has a larger, higher-res display

Aura Carver
The Aura Carver can also only be used in horizontal orientation, but has a bigger 10.1-inch display and 1280 x 800 resolution, and looks classier all round