Product Review: Google Home Hub
The Google Home Hub may be small in size, but it’s surprisingly useful in a lot of ways, from organizing your smart home to walking you through a complex recipe, to finding you a place to eat if your cooking efforts fall short.
It’s easy to see the Google Home Hub as little more than an attempt to ape Amazon’s success with the Echo Show. Both devices have a screen, both use proprietary AI assistants and both are designed to be the centre of your smart home.
The Google Home Hub is the only major smart display so far without a camera, which might be a negative for some, but privacy-minded folks will appreciate its absence. Otherwise, it offers all the same features as the other smart displays for less, which makes the Google Home Hub a cute, useful gadget at a nice value.
The big design decision that sets the Home Hub apart from the Home is the addition of its 7in, 1,024 x 600-pixel panel. As a screen, it’s resolution isn’t quite up there with the first-gen Amazon Echo Show’s 1,200 x 800-pixel display, but it more than makes up for it with rich and accurate colours, and a solid contrast ratio.
As you’re likely using the Home Hub from afar, it never really matters either. Your photos still look great, and everything is wonderfully easy to read and interact with from the other side of the room. What’s more, along the top edge of the device is a light sensor that helps the Google Home Hub’s display always appear natural and never overly bright compared to the room’s ambient lighting.
When not in use, you can set the Home Hub to cycle through a gallery of selected Google Photo albums. You can also have it pull new images uploaded to Photos, letting it filter out the rubbish shots so you have a continually updating bank of images to display in your home.
On Home Hub’s main menu you’ll be greeted with a card-based interface showing the weather and your calendar events. Swiping along brings up recommendations from YouTube and Spotify, along with a smattering of Google News “top stories for you” links for Assistant to read out like bulletins or as YouTube videos.
If you’re a fan of Google and want a Google-centric smart home, or if you just like the idea of a smart speaker with a screen and want to try one out for the step-by-step recipe guides, I recommend the Google Home Hub. The seamless touch controls and intuitive voice commands will even help the tech-phobic members of your family get used to it.
