Nest Cam review: Beautifully simple, but simply expensive

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.