The fourth generation of the Nest Learning Thermostat was announced and is available for preorders.

The new Nest Learning Thermostat features a new display, a new interface in the Home app, and a lot of saying it’s packed full of AI.

Having recently suffered through an AI-driven thermostat that couldn’t understand that I was on chemo, had lost all my hair, and just wanted to set and maintain a temperature above 62 in the winter, let me tell you how well the AI worked previously. Not very.

A “not smart” mode is not listed, but one can hope there will be ways to just lock the temperature and get around all the smart controls when you need to just set it and forget it and maintain. We can also hope that Google Location Services that work with the Home / Away assist will be fixed at some point and I won’t have to keep turning on the AC when Kim gets home because her phone only works 1/3rd of the time for home/away assist.

The new design looks nice, but in the end it’s a thermostat you can control based on a number of conditions and I don’t see a lot of reason to be excited.

The new Nest Learning Thermostat is available to pre-order in Silver, Black, and Gold for $279.99 in the Google Store.

[Google Blog]

Google’s new Nest Learning Thermostat available for pre-orders by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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Google is finally giving us another Nest Learning Thermostat. It's a long-overdue update, with the current generation now nine years old. Rumors say the 4th version of Google's smart thermostat will cost nearly $300, a price that, only a few years ago, I'd only dream of paying for a thermostat if it crooned me lullabies at night or offered a J.A.R.V.I.S-level administrative assistance.

It’s Saturday Night, for reasons unknow I’m sleepier than normal and decide to go to bed early. At 11:13 I hear two very close and very loud gunshots… my wife asks me if that was the cat and I tell her I doubt he’s learned to fire a 9mm, let along in such rapid succession.

Being the action hero that I am I check the camera and rewind just to verify that I did in fact hear gunfire and not that guy with the supposedly specially tuned car.. I say specially tuned because he shows up on neighborhood forums anytime someone calls it a gunshot muffler. Nope, it’s not him and I am about to call police when I hear the police.

With my street swarmed by police I wander out to offer the audio of my cameras. The shooter did not go by my house and I don’t have cameras aimed up the road, although I suspect I should at this point.

In the Google Home app I view the clip, attempt to download it so I can email it so they have the bang bang click (third shot jammed,) and no. I got nothing but “download failed” and an option to retry. I’ll save the next 20 minutes of attempting to download any clip from any Home-controlled camera using the Home app and skip to that I remembered one of my cameras is one of the old Nest cameras and can be accessed via the Nest App, which while it’s the same company, the Nest app actually works and isn’t a half assembled attempt at moving a working app into Google’s One App Solution.

I get the audio from the old nest app, create a clip, share it to YouTube and forward it to the police.

Completely failed by the Google Home implementation again.

A new Google Nest Camera fail over the weekend by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Hi there. My name is Paul and I’m stuck in the Nest ecosystem (unless I want to ditch several hundred dollars of product). Nest is a brand that Google acquired, decided to stamp the brand name on everything, started to integrate the app into Google’s one giant Home app, got stuck halfway through on the security side, and pretty much abandoned as far as any long term users can tell. The Google Home migration for Nest camera products has left users who migrated or were forced to migrate a list of cameras you can view from the web and that’s about it.

See, if I were able I would be on the Nest app, but unfortunately Google’s newer Nest cameras don’t work with the Nest app… they only work with the Home App.

The Home app features a lack of event history on the web for older devices (you have to go to the Nest app for those,) no ability to save clips, can’t create timelapse videos, was bad enough when Nest fell, but what was worse is Nest’s home/away generally worked and Google Home’s tends to be almost completely broken for me.

Now, my setup should be if either me or my wife is home the away mode should kick on, but if either of us is at home it should not. This is done with the Home app / Google Location Services.

What happens is if I leave the house is Away mode kicks on, and if my wife is still at home (happens in the mornings a lot,) I get notification after notification that someone is in the house. These are notifications I actually do want, but only after she’s left. If I’m driving to work it’s nonstop dings while I’m trying to listen to music or a podcast. This has resulted in me setting home mode multiple times just so I can listen to whatever I was listening to.

When I get home, I’m generally in the house and picked up by the living room cameras before Locations Services have had a chance to figure out I’m home, but if my wife gets home before me it may be a good 10 minutes before it recognizes her device and we both get notifications there’s movement until such time as it figured out we’re home, connected to the network, been in the geofence for minutes, offered the door handle gods a firm handshake, or whatever it is that triggers Google Location services to trigger.

I’ve had to set “home” mode many times when I’m not there and Kim is, and when she eventually is out the door and off to work I can guarantee you I’ve never thought to set it back to Away mode once I made it to work.

This combined with the numerous false alarms I get daily because I have a shadow on a wall that looks enough like a human face to trigger a person seen in my living room, or I have a tree that triggers my back yard camera’s person identification, and a chair in my backyard that quite often triggers and says it’s me recognized in the back yard, render any notifications I get pretty useless.

The problem here is I straight up do not pay any attention to Nest Alerts any more because I’ve been conditioned not to. This limits what usefulness this has, but the Location services really limit the use, or my trust, as I have found that I am listed as home sometimes when I am not.

While I could complain about where Nest stands in its obscenely slow transition to Google’s attempt at a One app in the form of Home, the main issue is location services and it is evident that is where the fault lies because in Google Maps we have a geofence that tells one another when we arrive at the kid’s schools. This is absurdly useful if you’re not on a regular schedule / can leave to work from home / or in the case of working in Nashville: stuck in traffic. There’s no wondering of “did they make it in time or do I need to call the school?.” Wouldn’t be an issue if our kids could be trusted with a device, or Nashville would adopt a sensible traffic light solution, but that’s evidently out the window at this point.

What happens more often than not is this produces a false worry that the other parent did not make it to school because the notification does not trigger. The geofence fails to establish that one of us went there, were there long enough to pick up a kid, and left.

And I think the reason for that is the location services and reporting just straight up don’t work. My daughter and some friends went out walking one day with another parent and I happened to be driving through the area and stopped at the location it said she was at. She wasn’t there. Really, sounds stalkeresque but her phone was reporting she was at one location next to where I was going, and she was actually 1200 feet away. Called and asked her where she was and yup, it was not there. Updated Google Maps / her location, was told that “just now” she was right where I was standing and the accuracy circle was pretty small on Google Maps.

These are three phones, two Samsungs and one Pixel, all using Google’s location services and all just off. The fact that my kid’s was reporting off by 1200 feet makes me think that is why me or my wife don’t enter the geofence of the schools to trigger notifications.

My wife’s phone, at home (work from home day,) showing at home on Google Maps (or in the neighbor’s back yard,) not at home for Google Location Services because I am getting alerts when she pops into range of a door camera and the heating/cooling has switched to away mode.

It’s a shame because this could probably be easily fixed and it’s been literally years of issues.

Randomly broken Google location services limit Nest security usefulness by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

It’s Saturday Night, for reasons unknow I’m sleepier than normal and decide to go to bed early. At 11:13 I hear two very close and very loud gunshots… my wife asks me if that was the cat and I tell her I doubt he’s learned to fire a 9mm, let along in such rapid succession.

Being the action hero that I am I check the camera and rewind just to verify that I did in fact hear gunfire and not that guy with the supposedly specially tuned car.. I say specially tuned because he shows up on neighborhood forums anytime someone calls it a gunshot muffler. Nope, it’s not him and I am about to call police when I hear the police.

With my street swarmed by police I wander out to offer the audio of my cameras. The shooter did not go by my house and I don’t have cameras aimed up the road, although I suspect I should at this point.

In the Google Home app I view the clip, attempt to download it so I can email it so they have the bang bang click (third shot jammed,) and no. I got nothing but “download failed” and an option to retry. I’ll save the next 20 minutes of attempting to download any clip from any Home-controlled camera using the Home app and skip to that I remembered one of my cameras is one of the old Nest cameras and can be accessed via the Nest App, which while it’s the same company, the Nest app actually works and isn’t a half assembled attempt at moving a working app into Google’s One App Solution.

I get the audio from the old nest app, create a clip, share it to YouTube and forward it to the police.

Completely failed by the Google Home implementation again.

A new Google Nest Camera fail over the weekend by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Hi there. My name is Paul and I’m stuck in the Nest ecosystem (unless I want to ditch several hundred dollars of product). Nest is a brand that Google acquired, decided to stamp the brand name on everything, started to integrate the app into Google’s one giant Home app, got stuck halfway through on the security side, and pretty much abandoned as far as any long term users can tell. The Google Home migration for Nest camera products has left users who migrated or were forced to migrate a list of cameras you can view from the web and that’s about it.

See, if I were able I would be on the Nest app, but unfortunately Google’s newer Nest cameras don’t work with the Nest app… they only work with the Home App.

The Home app features a lack of event history on the web for older devices (you have to go to the Nest app for those,) no ability to save clips, can’t create timelapse videos, was bad enough when Nest fell, but what was worse is Nest’s home/away generally worked and Google Home’s tends to be almost completely broken for me.

Now, my setup should be if either me or my wife is home the away mode should kick on, but if either of us is at home it should not. This is done with the Home app / Google Location Services.

What happens is if I leave the house is Away mode kicks on, and if my wife is still at home (happens in the mornings a lot,) I get notification after notification that someone is in the house. These are notifications I actually do want, but only after she’s left. If I’m driving to work it’s nonstop dings while I’m trying to listen to music or a podcast. This has resulted in me setting home mode multiple times just so I can listen to whatever I was listening to.

When I get home, I’m generally in the house and picked up by the living room cameras before Locations Services have had a chance to figure out I’m home, but if my wife gets home before me it may be a good 10 minutes before it recognizes her device and we both get notifications there’s movement until such time as it figured out we’re home, connected to the network, been in the geofence for minutes, offered the door handle gods a firm handshake, or whatever it is that triggers Google Location services to trigger.

I’ve had to set “home” mode many times when I’m not there and Kim is, and when she eventually is out the door and off to work I can guarantee you I’ve never thought to set it back to Away mode once I made it to work.

This combined with the numerous false alarms I get daily because I have a shadow on a wall that looks enough like a human face to trigger a person seen in my living room, or I have a tree that triggers my back yard camera’s person identification, and a chair in my backyard that quite often triggers and says it’s me recognized in the back yard, render any notifications I get pretty useless.

The problem here is I straight up do not pay any attention to Nest Alerts any more because I’ve been conditioned not to. This limits what usefulness this has, but the Location services really limit the use, or my trust, as I have found that I am listed as home sometimes when I am not.

While I could complain about where Nest stands in its obscenely slow transition to Google’s attempt at a One app in the form of Home, the main issue is location services and it is evident that is where the fault lies because in Google Maps we have a geofence that tells one another when we arrive at the kid’s schools. This is absurdly useful if you’re not on a regular schedule / can leave to work from home / or in the case of working in Nashville: stuck in traffic. There’s no wondering of “did they make it in time or do I need to call the school?.” Wouldn’t be an issue if our kids could be trusted with a device, or Nashville would adopt a sensible traffic light solution, but that’s evidently out the window at this point.

What happens more often than not is this produces a false worry that the other parent did not make it to school because the notification does not trigger. The geofence fails to establish that one of us went there, were there long enough to pick up a kid, and left.

And I think the reason for that is the location services and reporting just straight up don’t work. My daughter and some friends went out walking one day with another parent and I happened to be driving through the area and stopped at the location it said she was at. She wasn’t there. Really, sounds stalkeresque but her phone was reporting she was at one location next to where I was going, and she was actually 1200 feet away. Called and asked her where she was and yup, it was not there. Updated Google Maps / her location, was told that “just now” she was right where I was standing and the accuracy circle was pretty small on Google Maps.

These are three phones, two Samsungs and one Pixel, all using Google’s location services and all just off. The fact that my kid’s was reporting off by 1200 feet makes me think that is why me or my wife don’t enter the geofence of the schools to trigger notifications.

My wife’s phone, at home (work from home day,) showing at home on Google Maps (or in the neighbor’s back yard,) not at home for Google Location Services because I am getting alerts when she pops into range of a door camera and the heating/cooling has switched to away mode.

It’s a shame because this could probably be easily fixed and it’s been literally years of issues.

Randomly broken Google location services limit Nest security usefulness by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

It’s Saturday Night, for reasons unknow I’m sleepier than normal and decide to go to bed early. At 11:13 I hear two very close and very loud gunshots… my wife asks me if that was the cat and I tell her I doubt he’s learned to fire a 9mm, let along in such rapid succession.

Being the action hero that I am I check the camera and rewind just to verify that I did in fact hear gunfire and not that guy with the supposedly specially tuned car.. I say specially tuned because he shows up on neighborhood forums anytime someone calls it a gunshot muffler. Nope, it’s not him and I am about to call police when I hear the police.

With my street swarmed by police I wander out to offer the audio of my cameras. The shooter did not go by my house and I don’t have cameras aimed up the road, although I suspect I should at this point.

In the Google Home app I view the clip, attempt to download it so I can email it so they have the bang bang click (third shot jammed,) and no. I got nothing but “download failed” and an option to retry. I’ll save the next 20 minutes of attempting to download any clip from any Home-controlled camera using the Home app and skip to that I remembered one of my cameras is one of the old Nest cameras and can be accessed via the Nest App, which while it’s the same company, the Nest app actually works and isn’t a half assembled attempt at moving a working app into Google’s One App Solution.

I get the audio from the old nest app, create a clip, share it to YouTube and forward it to the police.

Completely failed by the Google Home implementation again.

A new Google Nest Camera fail over the weekend by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Hi there. My name is Paul and I’m stuck in the Nest ecosystem (unless I want to ditch several hundred dollars of product). Nest is a brand that Google acquired, decided to stamp the brand name on everything, started to integrate the app into Google’s one giant Home app, got stuck halfway through on the security side, and pretty much abandoned as far as any long term users can tell. The Google Home migration for Nest camera products has left users who migrated or were forced to migrate a list of cameras you can view from the web and that’s about it.

See, if I were able I would be on the Nest app, but unfortunately Google’s newer Nest cameras don’t work with the Nest app… they only work with the Home App.

The Home app features a lack of event history on the web for older devices (you have to go to the Nest app for those,) no ability to save clips, can’t create timelapse videos, was bad enough when Nest fell, but what was worse is Nest’s home/away generally worked and Google Home’s tends to be almost completely broken for me.

Now, my setup should be if either me or my wife is home the away mode should kick on, but if either of us is at home it should not. This is done with the Home app / Google Location Services.

What happens is if I leave the house is Away mode kicks on, and if my wife is still at home (happens in the mornings a lot,) I get notification after notification that someone is in the house. These are notifications I actually do want, but only after she’s left. If I’m driving to work it’s nonstop dings while I’m trying to listen to music or a podcast. This has resulted in me setting home mode multiple times just so I can listen to whatever I was listening to.

When I get home, I’m generally in the house and picked up by the living room cameras before Locations Services have had a chance to figure out I’m home, but if my wife gets home before me it may be a good 10 minutes before it recognizes her device and we both get notifications there’s movement until such time as it figured out we’re home, connected to the network, been in the geofence for minutes, offered the door handle gods a firm handshake, or whatever it is that triggers Google Location services to trigger.

I’ve had to set “home” mode many times when I’m not there and Kim is, and when she eventually is out the door and off to work I can guarantee you I’ve never thought to set it back to Away mode once I made it to work.

This combined with the numerous false alarms I get daily because I have a shadow on a wall that looks enough like a human face to trigger a person seen in my living room, or I have a tree that triggers my back yard camera’s person identification, and a chair in my backyard that quite often triggers and says it’s me recognized in the back yard, render any notifications I get pretty useless.

The problem here is I straight up do not pay any attention to Nest Alerts any more because I’ve been conditioned not to. This limits what usefulness this has, but the Location services really limit the use, or my trust, as I have found that I am listed as home sometimes when I am not.

While I could complain about where Nest stands in its obscenely slow transition to Google’s attempt at a One app in the form of Home, the main issue is location services and it is evident that is where the fault lies because in Google Maps we have a geofence that tells one another when we arrive at the kid’s schools. This is absurdly useful if you’re not on a regular schedule / can leave to work from home / or in the case of working in Nashville: stuck in traffic. There’s no wondering of “did they make it in time or do I need to call the school?.” Wouldn’t be an issue if our kids could be trusted with a device, or Nashville would adopt a sensible traffic light solution, but that’s evidently out the window at this point.

What happens more often than not is this produces a false worry that the other parent did not make it to school because the notification does not trigger. The geofence fails to establish that one of us went there, were there long enough to pick up a kid, and left.

And I think the reason for that is the location services and reporting just straight up don’t work. My daughter and some friends went out walking one day with another parent and I happened to be driving through the area and stopped at the location it said she was at. She wasn’t there. Really, sounds stalkeresque but her phone was reporting she was at one location next to where I was going, and she was actually 1200 feet away. Called and asked her where she was and yup, it was not there. Updated Google Maps / her location, was told that “just now” she was right where I was standing and the accuracy circle was pretty small on Google Maps.

These are three phones, two Samsungs and one Pixel, all using Google’s location services and all just off. The fact that my kid’s was reporting off by 1200 feet makes me think that is why me or my wife don’t enter the geofence of the schools to trigger notifications.

My wife’s phone, at home (work from home day,) showing at home on Google Maps (or in the neighbor’s back yard,) not at home for Google Location Services because I am getting alerts when she pops into range of a door camera and the heating/cooling has switched to away mode.

It’s a shame because this could probably be easily fixed and it’s been literally years of issues.

Randomly broken Google location services limit Nest security usefulness by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Hi there. My name is Paul and I’m stuck in the Nest ecosystem (unless I want to ditch several hundred dollars of product). Nest is a brand that Google acquired, decided to stamp the brand name on everything, started to integrate the app into Google’s one giant Home app, got stuck halfway through on the security side, and pretty much abandoned as far as any long term users can tell. The Google Home migration for Nest camera products has left users who migrated or were forced to migrate a list of cameras you can view from the web and that’s about it.

See, if I were able I would be on the Nest app, but unfortunately Google’s newer Nest cameras don’t work with the Nest app… they only work with the Home App.

The Home app features a lack of event history on the web for older devices (you have to go to the Nest app for those,) no ability to save clips, can’t create timelapse videos, was bad enough when Nest fell, but what was worse is Nest’s home/away generally worked and Google Home’s tends to be almost completely broken for me.

Now, my setup should be if either me or my wife is home the away mode should kick on, but if either of us is at home it should not. This is done with the Home app / Google Location Services.

What happens is if I leave the house is Away mode kicks on, and if my wife is still at home (happens in the mornings a lot,) I get notification after notification that someone is in the house. These are notifications I actually do want, but only after she’s left. If I’m driving to work it’s nonstop dings while I’m trying to listen to music or a podcast. This has resulted in me setting home mode multiple times just so I can listen to whatever I was listening to.

When I get home, I’m generally in the house and picked up by the living room cameras before Locations Services have had a chance to figure out I’m home, but if my wife gets home before me it may be a good 10 minutes before it recognizes her device and we both get notifications there’s movement until such time as it figured out we’re home, connected to the network, been in the geofence for minutes, offered the door handle gods a firm handshake, or whatever it is that triggers Google Location services to trigger.

I’ve had to set “home” mode many times when I’m not there and Kim is, and when she eventually is out the door and off to work I can guarantee you I’ve never thought to set it back to Away mode once I made it to work.

This combined with the numerous false alarms I get daily because I have a shadow on a wall that looks enough like a human face to trigger a person seen in my living room, or I have a tree that triggers my back yard camera’s person identification, and a chair in my backyard that quite often triggers and says it’s me recognized in the back yard, render any notifications I get pretty useless.

The problem here is I straight up do not pay any attention to Nest Alerts any more because I’ve been conditioned not to. This limits what usefulness this has, but the Location services really limit the use, or my trust, as I have found that I am listed as home sometimes when I am not.

While I could complain about where Nest stands in its obscenely slow transition to Google’s attempt at a One app in the form of Home, the main issue is location services and it is evident that is where the fault lies because in Google Maps we have a geofence that tells one another when we arrive at the kid’s schools. This is absurdly useful if you’re not on a regular schedule / can leave to work from home / or in the case of working in Nashville: stuck in traffic. There’s no wondering of “did they make it in time or do I need to call the school?.” Wouldn’t be an issue if our kids could be trusted with a device, or Nashville would adopt a sensible traffic light solution, but that’s evidently out the window at this point.

What happens more often than not is this produces a false worry that the other parent did not make it to school because the notification does not trigger. The geofence fails to establish that one of us went there, were there long enough to pick up a kid, and left.

And I think the reason for that is the location services and reporting just straight up don’t work. My daughter and some friends went out walking one day with another parent and I happened to be driving through the area and stopped at the location it said she was at. She wasn’t there. Really, sounds stalkeresque but her phone was reporting she was at one location next to where I was going, and she was actually 1200 feet away. Called and asked her where she was and yup, it was not there. Updated Google Maps / her location, was told that “just now” she was right where I was standing and the accuracy circle was pretty small on Google Maps.

These are three phones, two Samsungs and one Pixel, all using Google’s location services and all just off. The fact that my kid’s was reporting off by 1200 feet makes me think that is why me or my wife don’t enter the geofence of the schools to trigger notifications.

My wife’s phone, at home (work from home day,) showing at home on Google Maps (or in the neighbor’s back yard,) not at home for Google Location Services because I am getting alerts when she pops into range of a door camera and the heating/cooling has switched to away mode.

It’s a shame because this could probably be easily fixed and it’s been literally years of issues.

Randomly broken Google location services limit Nest security usefulness by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Whether your Google Nest Thermostat is new or you recently changed your network settings, you must connect your smart thermostat to Wi-Fi to take advantage of its wireless features. It isn't hard to connect Nest smart home devices to your network with help from your phone. The easy setup is one of the reasons Google's Nest Thermostat made it onto our list of the best smart home devices.

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Update: March 6, 2024 (2:16 PM ET): A Google spokesperson has reached out to Android Authority with the following statement confirming Fitbit Premium and Nest Aware as benefits for subscribers in the UK:

Google One Premium plans already offer amazing value, with 2TB of cloud storage, family sharing, premium features in Meet and Calendar, and more benefits that help members get the most out of Google. Fitbit Premium & Nest Aware are currently available with Google One Premium plans in the UK. We don’t have anything else to announce.

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