Alphabet's Nest Cam Outdoor (left) and Nest Cam Indoor.

Seeing as Nest has finally come to Australia, and seeing as the folks at Nest like to describe their products as "thoughtful" home technology, rather than "smart" home technology, we've found ourselves entertaining a dangerous notion.

What if, heaven forbid, that were actually true?

What if Nest, a company with all the resources in the world given it's owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, actually had thought long and hard about its smart-home products, its smoke detectors, its thermostats and its security cameras? What if those products really were more thoughtful than all the other stuff on the market, the stuff we've spent the last two years reviewing here in the Digital Life Labs, two years of our lives that we're never going to get back?

What would those products look like? Would they be any different from the indoor and outdoor smart-home security cameras and the smart smoke detector that Nest just launched in Australia? Being the thoughtful little gadget reviewers that we are (and what if that were actually true, too?) we've put together a shopping list for you, of some of the things that you should look for if ever you were crazy enough to buy into the shemozzle that is the so-called smart home.

It goes without saying that smart home equipment has to be easy to install. Not everyone is as smart as you are. And, on that front, Nest is as good as you could hope for. Once you've installed the Nest app on your phone and set up a Nest account on the internet, all you have to do is point your phone's camera at the QR code printed on the Nest device, and it's good to go.

And if you install, say, a Nest Cam Indoor security camera together with a Nest Protect smoke alarm, the basic rules governing the interaction between those devices are automatically set up for you, too. The camera automatically activates and starts recording whenever smoke is detected. Nest is good like that.

What needs to be said though is that simplicity shouldn't be bought at the cost of sophistication. If you want to geek out by setting up some peculiar rules for your smart home let's say you want the Nest security camera in your living room to activate and alert you the moment someone tunes the Foxtel box to some adult channel you should be able to program that too, even if it's a little tricky.

Nest isn't good like that. It doesn't expose its controls to other smart-home platforms in your house the way Linksys Wemo devices do and gaining access to those Nest controls outside the house, out in the cloud, is a right pain.

In a thoughtful home, would the connected devices run on batteries or on mains?

For its Nest Cam Indoor and Nest Cam Outdoor security cameras, Nest has opted for mains, which is an imperfect answer, but no more imperfect than opting for batteries the way, say, Netgear's Arlo has.

Particularly when you're installing them outdoors, mains-powered security cameras take a lot more installing, and doubly so with the Nest Cam Outdoor camera, which has a thick power cable that can't be unplugged, meaning you may have to cut and re-terminate it if you need to fit the power cable through a small hole in your brickwork.

But once they're in place, mains powered devices are definitely better. To save power, battery-powered security cameras tend to go to sleep, waking up when motion is detected but never waking up fast enough to actually capture all the motion. The Nest cameras, on the other hand, record all the time, so you never miss a frame of the burglar walking out your door with your TV.

A lot of smart-home equipment seems to have been designed with the US market in mind, where internet upload must be plentiful and fast.

But not everyone has fast broadband upload speeds. Some of us have to live in the world dreamt up by Malcolm Turnbull, where the internet isn't nearly as fast nor as symmetrical as it might be, and in that world a lot of smart-home equipment more or less breaks. Ring's smart doorbell, for instance, is almost completely useless without fast(ish) upload speeds.

Mercifully, Nest lets you tailor your upload speed requirements, lowering the video quality so it matches the quality of your broadband upload connection. Which, unless you are lucky enough to have fibre to the home, is often no more than a trickle.

The only thing more annoying than having a false alarm sent to your phone by your so-called smart home is coming home to discover that someone has walked out with your TV, and your security cameras have completely missed it. Getting the right balance between false positives and false negatives is rare in the smart-home world (Arlo cameras send alerts to your phone whenever a cloud passes in front of the sun, for instance), but Nest is pretty good at it.

For instance, you can set your Nest cameras so they only alert you when they see what they think is a person. In our tests, it worked surprisingly well, and has eliminated almost all the false positives from the system without yet creating any false negatives.

You can also set your Nest camera so it alerts you when it sees any type of motion, which will all-but eliminate the risk of false negatives, but will tend to give you more false positives. However, at least the false alarms will appear on your phone with a different message ("Your Kitchen camera has noticed some activity", as opposed to "Your Kitchen camera thinks that it saw someone"), so you're far less likely to have a heart attack when you see it.

You can also set the Nest cameras so they alert you when they hear noises, like people speaking or dogs barking, but in our tests that feature only works when people speak quite loudly very near the camera, which seems a little useless.

In an ideal, thoughtful world, smart-home equipment would function locally as well as in the cloud. Rules, such as "start recording whenever you see motion", would work even when there was no internet connection, and interactions between devices, even those from different manufacturers, would take place directly or via a local hub, without the need for a cloud service to act as the go between.

The trouble is, that doesn't mesh with the way the smart-home manufacturers operate. Most manufacturers want you to buy a monthly subscription to their services, and so they put things like file storage, image processing and device interactivity in the cloud where you have to pay for them.

Nest is more guilty of this than most. You can't connect a Nest camera to, say, a Philips Hue light globe without going into the cloud, which means it's too slow to be used for simple home automations, such as automatically turning lights on the moment the camera detects motion.

Worse still, you can't even connect two Nest devices together locally. In order to trigger Nest cameras to start videoing whenever it detects smoke, the Nest Protect smoke alarm has to notify the Nest cloud service of the alert, and get it to turn on the cameras.

What if the cloud service isn't available? What if the internet connection to the house is down because, you know, the house is on fire?

See the rest here:

Google Nest review: a shopper's guide to the thoughtful smart home - The Australian Financial Review