Speaker 1: Google launched a new Pixel seven and Pixel seven Pro, as well as a new Pixel watch today. But they also had a couple of smart home announcements this week that they showed off here at their Made by Google event in Brooklyn. We’re gonna run through those right now.
Speaker 1: Up first we got our first hands on. Look at the New Nest Wifi Pro, which is the new mesh router for the Nest family. It’s got wifi 60 compatibility, which means that it adds in access to the six gigahertz band. It’s a much wider [00:00:30] band than 2.4 or five gigahertz. So you’ve got a lot of room for wide channel connections with NextGen devices that can use that standard. Very interesting, especially given that Nest Wifi Pro is gonna be 1 99 for a one pack or 3 99 for a three pack. That’s a very affordable price point for a wifi 60 router compared to what’s already out there on the spec side of things. Each Nest wifi pro unit is identical, which is different from the last version of Nest wifi where you had a separate router and separate extenders. Also the extenders [00:01:00] that doubled as smart speakers.
Speaker 1: Those are gone this time. They are just mesh routers. Now each of those identical Nest wifi Pro units also comes with ethernet ports in the back, which is another key upgrade over the last time when the extenders didn’t have ethernet ports at all. With those ethernet ports back there, you can wire the units together for a wired back haul that’ll deliver faster speeds throughout your home. It’s a nice upgrade. Now one of the interesting things that’s missing here, I think is a multi gig Jack in the back. The ethernet port that you’re gonna use to connect to your modem here is still capped at one gigabit per second. [00:01:30] So if you get a fancy new multi gig internet plan from a name like Frontier or a Zippy Fiber or even Google Fiber, you’re not gonna be able to take full advantage of it with this router. So interesting omission there.
Speaker 1: The other new product of the day on the smart home side of things was the Nest Doorbell, the wired version of it. Now we’ve already seen the Nest Hello Doorbell and the Battery Powered Nest doorbell. This one hardwired. So you’re not gonna need to change a battery or worry about that. You’re also gonna get better image quality thanks to software upgrades and larger pixels. [00:02:00] 125% larger. They tell us. That said, the New Nest wired doorbell has the same nine 60 P resolution as the battery version. So it’ll be interesting in our test to see how much better the image actually is just based off of software and larger pixels. And then speaking of software, the other big announcement here from Google this week was the revamp of the Google Home Map. It’s been redesigned with new controls for your cameras live video right in the home screen.
Speaker 1: Uh, you got better organization, I’ll say, for the smart home devices, including automatic grouping of the different types of devices [00:02:30] in your house. So that might be interesting to play with and it might make things a little more easy and accessible. The big thing here is that Google is really setting the table for the launch of matter. We’re expecting to see all sorts of new gadgets that support matter next year, especially at ces. So what Google’s doing here is they’re really setting the table for that. They want to be able to bring all of those devices in. You’ve got matter support directly built into Androids. So it’ll make it easier to pair with your devices at home. Uh, it’s gonna be a smart home control center. It’s gonna try to be. So we’ll see if that is a pitch that catches on in 2023. [00:03:00] We’ll be testing out all the new devices and giving you all the details as we get our hands on them in the coming week. So stay tuned for that. On cnet, I’m Rik Kris.
