About a year after Google acquired smart thermostat maker Nest and connected camera maker Dropcam, the company is launching its first security camera.

The Nest Cam is basically an updated version of the DropCam Pro… but it’s called the Nest Cam and it has a slightly slimmer design.

nest cam_01

Like the Dropcam Pro, the Nest Cam sells for about $200, records video at up to 1080 resolution, and captures video with a 130 degree field of video. There’s also support for infrared recording and a built-in mic for recording audio and a speaker that lets you talk through the Nest from a remote location.

The idea is you can drop the Nest Cam anywhere in your house and it’ll act as an internet-connected security camera which lets you monitor your home, kids, pets, or other valuables remotely. The Nest Cam can also send a notification to a mobile app for iOS or Android to let you know if it detects motion in your house when you’re not at home.

Nest has changed the design of the base of the camera and says it’s sturdier and easier to set up. The base is also magnetic, letting you mount the camera to a refrigerator.

You can stream live video for free. If you want to record and save videos to the cloud, you can sign up for a Nest Aware subscription which costs $10 per month if you want to save up to 10 days at a time, or $30 per month for 30 days of archived video.

nest cam app

One of the key new features Nest is introducing is integration with the Nest Protect smart smoke alarm. If you’ve got a Nest Protect and a Nest Cam in your home, you can configure them to work together so that the camera will start recording video as soon as smoke is detected.

Speaking of the Nest Protect, the company is launching a second-gen model which will ship in July for $99. It has a new sensor which should be better at detecting smoke and there’s a new feature that lets you cancel a false alarm using a mobile app or trigger a test alarm from your phone.

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5 replies on “Nest Cam is Google’s $200 connected camera”

  1. So, slightly smaller than a Piper, but without all the sensors (yet somehow still more expensive). It looks very similar to the $35 Xiaomi Xiaoyi, I have to say…

  2. for the 600 bucks that this thing will cost, you can buy a turnkey 8 channel setup (it even comes with a free monitor)…

  3. Grrr. Another great IP camera needing some proprietary phone app, cloud service or browser-specific plugin (ActiveX/Java). Come on people, make the stream URL accessible (and not hidden in the HTML source code, in a JS file within an iframe) so I can connect using a standard media player.

    And clamp mount or at least a tripod screw or GTFO.

    1. Well, one is a camera and the other is a smoke detector. What were you expecting them to do?

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