Google Home Hub Reviews: The Best Digital Photo Frame

According to Google Photos, I have 8,536 photos of my two daughters dating back to the day of my eldest child's birth. Thanks to the new Google Home Hub, I've been able to revisit hundreds of these photos over the last few days, each pulling in my heart and reminding me of great memories of these images growing as they're being displayed. # 39; screen.

The Google Home Hub at 149 USD is not just a digital photo frame, it's such a good frame that, if it did not do anything else, I could see many parents and grandparents paying the price asked without thinking twice.

Of course, if you buy the Home Hub, you also have a smart display and a centralized smart home control hub. The Home Hub is not the largest, most expensive, most powerful or most vivid smart screen you can buy, but it could be the best for most people.

And if you were looking for a way to see all those wonderful memories that you have captured with your smartphone over the years, the Home Hub is undeniably the easiest way to view them.

The ambitions of the Home Hub digital photo frame are visible in the design of the hardware. This looks almost exactly like a 7-inch touch pad permanently affixed to a landscape-oriented stand. This stand is covered with fabric – much like the popular Home Mini – and houses a single small speaker. There are also volume buttons and a mute switch for microphones always listening to the hub at the back.

Beyond that, the first thing most people notice about the Hub is its small size. Unlike the Lenovo Smart Displays or the Amazon Echo Show, the Home Hub is remarkably compact, making it easy to place it on a countertop, bedside table, mantel or end table without dominating it. completely space. I could even put it at the bottom of the stove to keep an eye on it while preparing a recipe.

On the other hand, some might find the Home Hub too small for their tastes and wish for a larger version with a larger screen and more powerful speakers. The small size also makes the hub a bit unstable when you touch the touch screen. In fact, I did not flip it, but it fluttered every time I touched the screen or adjusted the volume.

The front panel houses this screen, two remote microphones, and the key to what makes the hub material so powerful for displaying photos: the "Ambient EQ" light sensor. This sensor allows the concentrator to automatically adjust its brightness and color temperature based on the ambient lighting of the room. So, whether in your bedroom near a dim lamp or in your kitchen, the sunlight on your counter is pleasant to watch. This is reminiscent of the Tone feature of recent iPhones and iPads, but Google says that the Auto Tune feature has been set specifically so that the pictures displayed on the screen look like an image printed in a frame.

And it works. The Home Hub screen is nice to look at, never too bright, with saturation and nice colors. The relatively low resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels is never a problem of use and it looks great in the whole room or just a few steps away. The screen is very effective at fighting glare and its appearance is really different from any other digital signage on which I've been viewing photos. Google's setting is great for recreating the look of a printed image. Unlike poor-quality digital photo frames that were popular a decade ago, the Home Hub does justice to your images. I found myself watching the thing for minutes at a time while waiting for it to regenerate itself with new memory. (You can also browse images in slideshow mode.) I'm surprised that the company does not use the same effect on Pixel 3 smartphones.

The Home Hub also uses the light sensor to automatically lower the brightness of the display and display a digital clock when you turn off the light in the room. So your bedside table will not be distracted when you try to sleep.

Getting images on the Home Hub is a simple way to link your Google Photos account during setup and select which albums to display. The Hub works with new live albums from Google Photos that will automatically update with new images of people you select, based on Google Photos' facial recognition features. (That's what I used to discover: between my wife and I, we have more than 8,500 images of our girls.) Then you can share this album with anyone with one Google Photos account, making the Home Hub an ideal digital photo frame. grandparents who are automatically updated with cool pictures as often as you take them.

The Home Hub software is smart enough to present two vertically oriented pictures side by side instead of clipping them awkwardly. It also groups the images of the same person when it displays them.

The Home Hub Ambient Photo Slide Show feature does not support any type of video or animation. I have hundreds of video clips of my kids that I would like to see on this screen, even though it was only dumb animations, but I can not do it. do without projecting them from my phone. A Google representative said "the team made the decision not to include moving content is distracting on a screen, especially for the "Ambient mode", but they have not ruled out adding it in the future.

In addition to the photo slideshow, the home hub can play videos from a variety of sources, including YouTube and YouTube TV. You can also stream videos from your phone or computer to the hub with apps such as Hulu, HBO Go, and more. Frustrated, it's not possible to play Netflix on the Home Hub, either in native mode or streaming from your phone. Google tells me that this limitation is a Netflix decision and that it hopes to be able to add Netflix in the future.

To watch videos, the display of the hub is as beautiful as for the photos and the sound quality of the single speaker is sufficient. The same is true for Google Assistant voice responses, podcasts, or other voice-based audio content. But the speaker does not sound good when he plays music. The sound is flat, thin and simply uncomfortable to listen to, especially when you increase the volume beyond 50%. This is roughly similar to the Home Mini, but at a louder volume. Fortunately, you can connect the Home Hub to a larger Bluetooth speaker if you want to get better audio quality for music.

The Hub's other features and software are very similar to those available on Google's smart screens and on Lenovo's smart screens and those released earlier this year. It can show you the current weather, upcoming calendar appointments, directions (which are then sent to your phone), random facts, sports scores, timers, alarms and many other items. information you could ask. The hub can be used as a digital cookbook, displaying step-by-step instructions and video guides. It's smart, but I often found the recipes restrictive and often not the ones I was looking for.

Amazon Echo Show has many of the same features and functionality as the Hub, but since Google is already so deeply embedded in my life and has a much larger data pool on my activities, preferences, etc., of Many Hub information versions of these features are much more useful and satisfying to use. But I always prefer saying "Alexa" to "OK Google" or "Hey Google" every time I want to use voice commands to control smart display.

Google has also updated the smart home control interface for the main hub, which is now much more complete and powerful. Combined with the new Home app for iOS and Android, the Hub can display all the rooms in your home and all the smart devices you've installed. You can access specific lights or switches, regardless of where they are, or simply switch to entire groups of lights at once. You can also get a summary of the smart devices in your home when you slide your finger from the top to the bottom of the screen. The home hub will also serve as a viewer for video bells and Nest cameras, but that does not work for the moment with other brands.

Despite its name and its more extensive smart home control capabilities, the home hub is not a smart home hub; you must always set up devices with their own hubs or your Wi-Fi network, and then connect them to your Google Assistant account before you can control them with the home hub. Amazon's new Echo Show lets you set up and control smart devices without additional applications, hubs, or your phone.

The other major asset of the Home Hub is a camera for video calling. Google claims to have specifically omitted a camera to make people feel comfortable placing the Hub in a bedroom or other intimate area of ​​their home. Personally, I did not miss it. From my experience testing these devices, I find that they are rather clunky for video calling as it is difficult to reposition the camera for better framing or better viewing. The fact that you always have a camera connected to the Internet to watch you poses a problem of confidentiality that is not worth the trouble of making video calls with the device. The Home Hub can make voice calls through the Google Duo system and can be used to broadcast to other home devices on your Wi-Fi network, such as an intercom, if you wish to use it to communicate.

Of all the devices in the Google Home product family, the Home Hub has quickly become my favorite. It's a great little smart home controller, a great little smart speaker for alarms and timers, and a near-perfect digital photo frame to display the thousands of photos I've stored in my Google Photos account. It is also more compact than the smart screens of Lenovo and others. So I can keep it on my bedside table or my kitchen counter without taking up too much space. Of course, that does not sound as good as a Sonos One, Google Home Max or even a new Echo Dot, but none of these shows me pictures of my daughter learning to ride a bike for the first time of my life.

This is enough to make the Home Hub a permanent home and probably several other parents and grandparents.

Photography by Dan Seifert / The Verge

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