Forget Apple’s iPad Or Amazon’s Echo Show, This Is My Perfect Video Call Device - Forbes

This photo shows a new Google Nest Hub Max on display during the Google I/O conference at Shoreline ...

But a year after receiving my Google Nest Hub Max - and partly thanks to being cooped-up at home for four months - my Google smart display has unintentionally become one of the most important lockdown devices in my house. .

Here are the device’s key features; video playback (specifically YouTube), music playback, cooking recipes, video calling and smart home control. .

Here’s the problem; no one else I knew had a Nest Hub Max and few friends use Duo, so video calls were largely out of the question.

Juggling between laptops, phones and tablets when video calling - I've noticed that the experience is simpler, and smoother, on a dedicated device like the Nest Hub Max.

The Covid-19 pandemic must have awoken Google’s Nest division because the company has announced a raft of new features for the device that actually make it useful.

Having a dedicated device, and a designated space for video calls, is ideal in this new world.

It’s the same with Nest and video calling, it needs a critical mass of people with the right device and service.

Quick, instant video calling via Meet and Duo to other people with a dedicated video chat device in their home is basically how 90s teleconferencing companies imaged what the future would be like. .

This is the key difference when it comes to using a tablet, like Apple’s iPad, for video calling.

Features like auto-framing, or barking an order to start/join a call in my calendar with the device taking care of everything else, makes a huge difference.

At a Google event I attended to unveil the Nest Hub Max in May 2019, the organisers were keen to stress how the smart display had been imbued with important privacy features, including; physical off-buttons for the camera and microphones, and facial recognition processing taking place locally on the device rather than on a remote server. .

On my Google Home (not the Hub Max), the speaker even struggles with toggling volume via voice command with Assistant turned off.”

You’ll have to weigh up whether or not the convenience of a Nest Hub Max is worth another data sucking device in your house. 

Having a dedicated video calling device that’s set up in one place has offered my household a level of specialised connectivity that other devices don’t

The novelty of owning a video-calling specific device, alongside a more pressing need to connect with friends and family in a way phone calls don’t offer - with auto-framing and the new incoming group calls functionality - has quietly made the Nest Hub Max one of the most important lockdown devices in my house