Google Nest Battery Doorbell Review
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This product was purchased for this review.
Tested with scoring system 1.0
What do these scores mean?
Learn about our data-driven scoring system.
Pros
✔ Amazing smart detection of all object types✔ Very reliable motion detection
✔ Excellent audio quality
Cons
✔ Lowest camera spec in it's price range✔ Doesn't detect motion well at longer distances
✔ Video playback can be slow
The Verdict
The Google Nest (Battery) doorbell presents an interesting compromise on features and performance, a compromise that it really shouldn’t have for the price. On the one hand Google delivers some of the best smart motion detection I’ve seen with a full range of object detection types, including familiar faces, and rock-solid reliable package detection.
On the other hand, you get the lowest spec camera of any doorbell I’ve tested. It’s as if Google hasn’t bothered revisiting this hardware since the very first model from years ago. Video resolution is part of this, resulting in far lower image clarity then the competition, but also faring poorly with dynamic range in shadows and low light. Notifications can also be a bit slow, making it less useful for timely security responses.
Other aspects of the Google Nest package are fairly positive, however. My testing found the audio quality to be very good, notifications to be reliable, and the overall app experience largely positive. While it is specifically intended for battery use, you have the option of wired power and the use of wired chimes as well, and the mounting hardware inspires far more confidence than most doorbells.
Overall, it’s a good doorbell package if you aren’t concerned about super high-quality video or policing the front yard. A Nest Aware subscription gets you face recognition and allows you to keep recordings for up to 30 days. Unlike other subscription doorbells you can still review events from the last 3 hours without a subscription. You also get to the rest of the object and package alerting features, making this a viable option.
Type: Hybrid wired/battery video doorbell
Subscription: Required for smart features and recording
Price Segment: $$$$$
Test Results
Each doorbell I review is put through a series of repeated test cycles over a 30-day period. These tests give me 32 data points that make up the 7 overall category scores above. These scores rate each doorbell key performance requirements like video and audio quality, motion capture performance, smart detection accuracy and the overall user experience.
Here’s how this video doorbell ranks compared to the average of other doorbells I’ve tested:
| Data Point | ||
|---|---|---|
| Video Quality | 5.0 | 7.8 |
| Night Vision Quality | 5.1 | 6.9 |
| Dynamic Range | 3.3 | 6.7 |
| Two-Way Talk | 8.8 | 7.5 |
| App Audibility | ||
| Outdoor Audibility | ||
| Recorded Audio | 10.0 | 9.0 |
| Notification Delay | 7.8 | 7.5 |
| Thumbnail Average | ||
| Doorbell Average | ||
| Text-only Average | ||
| Thumbnail Effectiveness | 8.7 | 6.9 |
| Day Success | ||
| Night Success | ||
| Missed Events | 9.8 | 9.3 |
| Day Misses | ||
| Night Misses | ||
| Camera Wake Delay | 7.1 | 8.1 |
| Frame Remaining Day | ||
| Frame Remaining Night | ||
| Event Capture | 4.6 | 5.8 |
| Record Start Day | ||
| Record Start Night | ||
| Package Monitoring | 8.8 | 5.6 |
| Package Features | ||
| Detection Success | ||
| Smart Detection | 10.0 | 6.9 |
| Smart Features | ||
| Day Accuracy | ||
| Night Accuracy | ||
| Live View Response | 8.0 | 8.6 |
| Live View Time | ||
| Doorbell Ring Response | ||
| Privacy Features | 8.1 | 8.2 |
| App Usability | 6.4 | 7.8 |
| Battery Performance | 6.0 | 7.9 |
| After 30 days | ||
| Time To Dead |
The Basics
Tech Specs
Power: Wired or BatteryRemovable Battery: No
Can Use Wired Chime: Yes
Connectivity: Wi-Fi Dual Band
Resolution: 960 x 1280
Storage: Cloud
Weather Rating: IP54
Field of View: 100 degrees
Compatibility: Google Assistant
Smart Detection: Yes
Footprint (WxH): 46mm x 160mm
Notable Features:
- Button ring light
- Quick voice responses
- Facial recognition
- Package removal alerts
The Google Nest (Battery) doorbell comes in a typical clean, white Google design (although it’s also available in gray) with a particularly elongated design providing for decent internal battery space without taking up too much width on the wall.
The mount design uses a nice, solid metal wall plate which the doorbell clips onto by way of a metal hook at the bottom and a spring loaded clip at the top. The clip is retracted by inserting the special removal tool into a slot at the top of the doorbell for charging.
The doorbell button is the most prominent features and is supported by a light ring that pulses when motion is detected to draw visitors to the button at night. A small status LED is also present which lights green when recording or uses the two-way talk feature. This is very small, however, and is more useful for diagnostics than anything else.
The packaging is compact and efficient and includes a wedge mount in addition to the basic wall plate, a USB-C charge cable, plus all the screws and wires you’ll need. There’s no chime included, but you can use existing wired chimes or a Google smart speaker or display.
Video Storage
Cloud only - 30 days via Nest Aware cloud subscription or 3 hours without.
Chime Options
Wired chimes
Google smart speakers and displays
A simple, solid metal mount plate
The metal anchor pin at the bottom
Pushing into the slot retracts the small button for release
Camera Performance
The biggest surprise with the Goolle Nest doorbell is the camera itself. With only a 960 x 1280 resolution we’re just not going to get good clarity results here. To be fair, the image quality is not terrible. Color reproduction is fairly good, and I didn’t experience any severe over exposure in bright daylight, even with a white shirt on.
Checking the test chart, however, clearly shows the shortcomings. I could only get a good read on the chart out to 4m (13ft). Given this is the lowest resolution doorbell camera I’ve tested, it’s not surprising that this is also the shortest image clarity test distance recorded.
Using it as a doorbell this isn’t a problem. Seeing who’s at the door and talking to them is fine. It only becomes an issue if you need to see detail at a distance in the event you’re reviewing a security event. If you want your doorbell to double as a security camera, this probably isn’t the right choice.
Given the camera resolution you’d expect to see equally poor results in the night vision test. That’s not necessarily the case, though. This test measures IR performance more than the base camera, so we actually see a better score here than during the day. Yes, the camera resolution holds it back, but the infra-red performance is actually not too bad, delivering a readable chart at 3.6m (11ft).
It’s normal for doorbells to have a lower read distance at night, so this result fares batter against the competition. It’s still not great if you want general security coverage being lower than the rest of the field, although closer to Ring’s battery offerings than the daylight results.
Dynamic range was even worse for Google, with a very poor result defining the swatches on the OECF chart with a bright background. The software was only able to distinguish 3 swatches clearly, with 2 partials for a total of 4 out of 12 points.
You can see in live video snapshot below that the camera doesn’t handle the wide variation in brightness between the shade in the foreground and the bright daylight behind. The whole image is dimmer as a result. While the low camera resolution was probably a factor in the swatch definition, this lower exposure was clearly the major culprit.
Audio Performance
Testing two-way talk was fairly good. I had some trouble initially getting it to work. For some reason it wouldn’t enable the microphone in the app. After juggling some settings back and forth is started to behave. I put this down to random chance and not a general issue with the doorbell.
Once we got it working the communication between inside and outside parties was excellent. Audio streaming was consistent, fast, and clear. Voice reproduction was perfect and there were no audio artifacts or dropouts at all. Wind noise was present even with a light breeze, but this isn’t unusual with these small microphones.
Audibility was the only downside holding the Google Nest doorbell back from a perfect score. While very good, the volume of speech did become difficult to hear at around 7-8m (22-26ft) for both the outside person and the app user. This was purely a volume issue stemming from hardware limitations of the microphone and speaker in the device.
Audio capture in recorded video tests was similarly excellent. Reproduction was perfect, with no artifacts, distortion or skipping during the recorded events. Pickup range was well beyond 3m (10ft) at normal speaking volume, which is perfectly adequate for doorbell use. This gives Google a perfect score for this test.
Notification Performance
Notification speed was acceptable and fairly consistent for both text and thumbnail notifications. The average of 8.9 seconds is higher than most of the competition and was dragged up by the relatively slow text notifications. These ranged from 5.5 seconds up to 7.8 seconds, which is quite slow for this type.
Adding in thumbnails added significant delay, with the thumbnail version coming in between 11.2 and 16 seconds. It should be noted that this is for the static thumbnail that is included in the notification itself. Google offers an additional feature where expanding the notification shows a short animation of several frames from the video. This extra detail takes a bit longer again.
By default, the Google Nest doorbell will deliver the text notification first, then a second thumbnail version with additional object description, such as any recognized faces.
You’ll likely get the base text notification before someone rings the doorbell, but only just. The doorbell ring notification will take another 4.3 seconds on average, which is also on the slower side.
A Note on Notifications
Most doorbells will provide a method of reducing repeat notifications for the same event. This is often a 'frequency' or time delay setting. The Google Nest doorbell does this too, but does not provide any control over this. Notifications of the same type will simply not be sent again for some time. I've measured this at around 8 minutes, but it's not entirely consistent.
This means that a specific notification type, say 'Person detected' will not be sent again for this time, but a different notification can be, like 'Person with Package detected'. The event will still be recroded, you just won't be told about it again until the time limit is up for that specific type.
Thumbnails provide a super valuable addition to notifications by allowing you to quickly see what the notification is about without having to open the doorbell app and review the video. It’s so helpful that it warrants its own scoring category. It has to clearly show what caused the notification to be useful, and that’s what I measure here.
Google manages to show the source of a motion event in the thumbnail 86% of the time. In 4 of the motion tests, it failed to show me in the thumbnail, although a thumbnail was always provided. These misses only occurred in the daytime crossing tests where I’m not in frame for a long period of time.
This is where most doorbells fail to capture the subject of the motion detection, so it’s fairly normal. Indeed, this result puts the Google Nest doorbell firmly in the middle of the pack.
Motion Detection Performance
In terms of catching a motion event, the Google Nest doorbell tested very well with an overall miss rate of only 1.6%. It only failed to detect me in 2 out of 119 motion tests. An impressive result, but not quite the best as some models have a perfect score here.
This is still extremely good, however, and I wouldn’t consider it a reason to avoid this model.
This test measures how quickly the camera can wake up and start recording when motion is detected. This is done by walking across the camera field of view at close range to guarantee motion detection is triggered. How much of the visible frame the subject is captured in is then measured to give a score.
The Google Nest doorbell only has a 100 degree horizontal field of view, so it’s at a slight disadvantage here compared to wider angle lenses, but it still performs quite well. There is a lot of variability, though. Overall, I was recorded for at least half of the field of view making for a useable recorded event but giving Google a slightly below average performance on this metric.
When it comes to security monitoring, we want the camera to be able to capture an approaching subject from as far away as possible. How far matters to you will depend on your placement situation. Small front yards or confined porches will obviously not be able to take advantage of this, but it’s useful to know how far motion detection will trigger recording.
The Google Nest doorbell delivered a wide range of results in these tests, from all the way out at 8.5m (27ft) down to a measly 1.2m (4ft). The longer ranges were clearly outliers however, with most recordings coming in at the low end of the scale. The shorter recording distances make this doorbell fairly unsuited to general security surveillance and can even result in missed calls when factoring in the slower notification speeds.
Smart Detection Performance
Package detection is an area that is still developing within the doorbell industry. It’s something that many doorbells struggle to do reliably given the wide variety of package types, sizes and shapes. Different lighting and shadow conditions can also throw off detection for some models. The Google Nest doorbell fared far better, with an impressive 100% accuracy on low contrast box tests, and a 95% on the high contrast padded bag tests.
The vertical aspect ratio of the camera allows for good visibility almost to the bottom of the door and a good portion of the porch area in front. This means that unless the package is placed right against the wall, it’s likely going to be visible and detected correctly.
The Google Home app supports three notifications related to packages: Person with package detected, Package detected, and Package no longer detected. This gives you better than average alerting and recording of events related to a delivery arriving, whether it was actually left, and when it was removed.
Feature scoring:
✘ Visibility of the test package directly below doorbell.
✔ Visibility of porch area in front of the doorbell.
✔ More than 30 degrees off center visibility to the side.
✔ Presence of active package alerting feature.
✔ Presence of additional package alerts
Following up on the impressive package detection accuracy, Google also provides a full range of smart detection features including vehicles, animals, and specific known faces. Apart from face detection, all of these are available for free. Face detection will need a Nest Aware subscription to be enabled.
You can configure specific combinations of event recording and notifications separately, so you can capture everything for later review without having to bombarded with notifications about the neighbors’ cats, and you have control over which faces you want it to recognize. Detected faces will be presented in the face recognition settings where you can choose to add them to the library and give them a name.
All event types, as well as the names of detected faces will send specific notifications and be marked as such in the event list for recorded videos. This provides a good level of detail both for understanding what’s been detected and when going through the list later.
Object detection in general was superb, with a 100% accuracy rate on detecting the source of the event. Face detection was a little less given it may not get the necessary angle to see a person clearly, but as this only adds bonus context any detection if useful here. The basic object detection type is still sent in addition to any face detection. Additionally, the doorbell was able to correctly filter out noise resulting in no false positives during windy conditions, event when all motion was enabled.
Feature scoring:
✔ Custom motion zones.
✔ Person detection.
✔ Animal Detection.
✔ Vehicle Detection.
✔ Facial Recognition.
Configuring a motion zone
Smart detection settings
Familiar face configuration
Battery Performance
When running on battery power (which is the point of this model, really) the Google Nest doorbell sucked a bit more juice than I would typically see under the same testing conditions with 58% remaining after the 30-day test cycle. The difference from the average battery doorbell is only a few percent, however, so it’s still competitive.
I test doorbell with all their settings enabled and on a high sensitivity. This is to ensure fair performance evaluations for motion detection and notification performance as I’m looking for what the doorbell is capable of. The testing process also creates a higher frequency of motion events than would be typical for most homes. Different setting and traffic density will likely mean you’ll get better battery life, but this does give a good metric for comparing different models’ consumption.
App Experience
Accessing the live video stream was a little slower than I expected. The average performance of doorbells I’ve tested is 3.2 seconds to start, but Google comes in a second slower, and with a little more variability of 3.4 seconds between slowest and fastest.
The live stream is where I want things to be snappy, you’re typically looking to see what’s going on right now, so waiting 4 seconds can seem like an eternity. It is, however not far off the typical doorbell experience for cloud-based models so still scores well. If you want really snappy performance, you’re going to need to get something that uses local processing, like Eufy doorbells or HomeKit Secure Video which both come in under 2 seconds.
Account security is not a concern here because the Google Home app is using your Google account, along with all the protections and security features that entails. This includes multi-factor authentication, passkeys, account access warnings and so forth.
While the account security itself is good, sharing devices is a blunt instrument. You can share access to your Google Home, and the doorbell within it, but you have no access control over anyone you invite. This means they can add and delete devices, and add and remove other users - including you. This seems nuts to me, and it’s baffling that Google would have such poor control for something this important. This loses Google some points here - it’s just bad.
Unfortunately, the Google Home app has been a poor neglected step-child of the Google eco system for some time. Often lacking features, and having a generally lackluster user experience, it’s not been my preferred smart home app. Google has given it some attention recently, but these kinds of missing features are still common.
Thankfully, for the doorbell at least, you do have some privacy control that many doorbell apps lack. You are able to easily disable audio recording or the microphone entirely with a simple toggle in the settings. You can also disable the doorbell completely using a Turn Off option located at the bottom of the video playback screen. The common Privacy Zone feature, however, is nowhere to be found, so you’ll be recording everything the camera can see.
Using the app, missing features notwithstanding, is largely fine. I encountered no bugs or issues with the available functionality apart from an annoying tendency for the app not to start playing a recorded clip. This was common when trying to flick through several recordings to find the one I wanted, only to be left with a spinning circle indefinitely. The only solution was to exit the playback view and come back in to try again.
Events are listed by default in a typical chronological list of thumbnails with time stamps and basic event type labels, like “Doorbell”, “Person”, “Parcel seen”, etc. You can scroll down the list, or select a specific day to jump to, but there’s no filter for event types, you just get everything.
A timeline view is also provided via a toggle button at the top of the list. This replaces the event names with a vertical timeline showing the location of recordings and an easy way to play them simply by scrolling through the list. I found this to be a bit clunky though as much of the time you are scrolling through empty space, the default event list just cuts to the chase better.
Once a clip is playing, you can easily scrub back and forth through it by sliding the position marker at the bottom. This works well and is something I like to help zero in on the part of an event that is of interest, or to simply fast forward through it to see if I need to look more closely.
Settings are laid out well under logical headings, so it was easy enough to find things. Most settings have good explanatory test so you know what they are for. This is more frequent than many brands, and often provides better context. Where there is more to learn, a contextual link to the support article is provided right in the app, which is excellent. The general help and support content is also easily found from the top right corner along with the Settings themselves.
One thing that was maddeningly difficult to find however, was the Nest Aware subscription. You have to go find that in the Google Store on your own. It’s quite odd they don’t link to this. You get a 30-day trial up front, but once this expires the Familiar Faces features simply disappears from the app entirely with no mention of how to get it back. Going to your account settings doesn’t point you to any subscription options, it’s a totally separate site. It’s a good thing you don’t need the subscription for most functionality.
Smart Home Features
Use Google Nest smart displays or smart speakers as chimes, and access live stream video.
Extra Features
Quick responses - Play back some built-in messages to a caller. Included messages are “Youn can just leave it”, “We’ll be right with you”, and “We can’t answer the door”.
Familiar Faces - Designate recognized faces as familiar to add them to your library and name them. This uses the name in notificatios and recordings when that person is detected.
Ring light - A white LED ring around the button to make it easy to locate in the dark. Pulses when motion is detected.
Alternatives
Video Quality
Eufy E340
7.5 Overall Score
Another excellent choice for package monitoring thanks to a dual camera system and Eufy's Delivery Guard features, the Eufy E340 also packs a high quality 2K camera and local processing. This gives it an edge on notification speed and live streaming performance when coupled with a Eufy Homebase. Good audio performance and better battery life round out this option.
Security
Full Product Name
8.1 Overall Score
If security coverage is your goal, the Ring Battery Doorbell Plus gives wide angle coverage, long range motion detection, and super fast notifications. Impressive run time from the removable battery is a bonus, but you'll lose out on Google impressive smart detection, with only person and package support on offer.
Budget
Aosu V8P
6.9 Overall Score
If audio quality isn't an concern, the Aosu V8P offers a cheaper alternative with excellent video quality and reliable person detection. No subscription is required for this one, with video stored on the included 8GB MicroSD card in the chime base station. Motion capture range is a bit better than the Google Nest, but be aware there's no package monitoring on this model.
Common Questions
Does the Google Nest (Battery) doorbell need a subscription?
Actually, no. While these doorbells are cloud-based in that they only record video in Google’s cloud service, you can keep 3 hours worth of events for free and use all of the smart object detection features except for Familiar Faces. If you want this or additional video event storage, you’ll need to sign up for a Nest Aware plan.
Does the Google Nest doorbell use the Nest app?
No, these new Google Nest doorbells use the Google Home app and for part of the Google smart home eco system.
Is the Google Nest Wired doorbell better?
If you have doorbell wiring, then yes. It’s more compact due to a lack of the battery and you have the option of 24/7 continuous video recording with a higher tier Nest Aware Plus subscription.
See my video doorbell guides to learn more about other models, features, and options.
