Google Home Hub review: Google’s small smart display is the one to buy

Google introduced its concept for smart displays back at Google I/O in May, with companies such as LG, JBL and Lenovo offering up their take on a combined display/smart speaker device.

Google unveiled the Google Home Hub at its Pixel 3 launch event, and it's a very different take from those earlier devices, with a smaller screen, no camera and a very distinct style.

It's not quite a must-have proposition – you could arguably cover much of what it does with a cheap Android phone and a Bluetooth speaker – but as a complete unit to either set up a smart home or add visual value to an existing Google Assistant-using household, it's a joy to use.

Design

• Smaller than you'd think
• Screen has good visibility
• Choice of colours

• Read more about the Google Home Hub's design

  Where the competing Amazon Echo Show 2nd Gen impresses by including a 10.1-inch LCD, Google's gone a little bit more subtle with the Google Home Hub, which features a 7-inch, 1024x600 pixel LCD display.

  That's not quite full HD quality, although on a display that size and with the visual style that Google has chosen for the Google Home Hub, that's not going to matter all that much anyway. The idea here is that the Google Home Hub is meant to be an unobtrusive display rather than one that's in your face in the way that a Chromecast-enabled or Android TV might be.

  Google sells the Google Home Hub in four different colours. You get to choose from Chalk, Charcoal, Sand and Aqua. Sand is (more or less) the same kind of colour scheme as that found on the Pixel 3, although there it's called "Not Pink" for some reason.

  Your choice of colour only affects the base on which the Google Home Hub's display screen sits, with every colour choice sharing the same white mounted bezel around the Home Hub's 7-inch display. So you can go for a dash of colour, or not, and it's not likely to upset your home decor to any great extent.

  You will have to work out how to snake the Google Home Hub's power cable through to it without disrupting your decor, but that's the only cable you have to worry about. The Google Home Hub only works off a wireless network connection, and there's no capability for hooking up external speakers to the Home Hub because there are no other inputs.

Performance

• Wide sound output
• Great microphone pickup
• Works well for background music streaming
• Small screen doesn't lend itself to lengthy YouTube binges

• Read more about the Google Home Hub's performance

  The Google Home Hub is equipped with relatively small speakers, as befits its tiny nature, but they've got quite decent audio reproduction despite that. You're not going to mistake it for the mighty sound output of the Google Home Max, but at the same time, it's quite suitable for background listening or catching a quick video recipe if you place the Google Home Hub in your kitchen.

  While it can't boast the same screen size as Amazon's competing Echo Show 2nd Gen, the tight integration of Google's own YouTube service is a real boon for the Google Home Hub. Calling up videos – or even just video playlists – is a snap, and while the small screen means you're unlikely to watch full-length movies on it, as a background playback device it's really rather nice.

  However, there's one caveat to that. Despite Google building casting of video and audio content into many of its other devices – from the Chrome browser to the Chromecast and even its iOS apps – there's no functionality to use the Google Home Hub this way. It feels odd that Google's not supporting one of its own video functions on what is so very clearly a video display.

  Not that it's all just about watching the latest viral video. The display can also intelligently cycle through your photo galleries stored with Google Photos. Google's claim is that it's using its own AI to intelligently pick the best pictures, without selecting anything blurry or dull. My own Google Photos library is a bit of a mess, but it did this excellently throughout the review process. As long as you don't think too hard about what that means Google knows about your photos, it's a great feature because it's basically a very intelligent photo frame.

  Microphone pickup for the Google Home Hub is also very good, and it's helped by the fact that your voice searches and requests are always displayed at the top of the 7-inch LCD, so you can accurately see what Google thinks you're after. It's a small but significant change because you can quickly see if you've been misinterpreted or not.

  The Google Home Hub supports alarms and calendar displays, although there's another missing function there that's rather surprising. Put a Pixel 3 on the Pixel Stand next to your bed, and it'll wake you with increasing brightness as you get closer to your alarm time. Despite being a fellow Google product, the Google Home Hub lacks that feature, springing to life when your alarm goes off instead.

  Smart home

  

  Having a visual display does give you a few extra toys to play with when it comes to integrating the Google Home Hub into your smart home environment. Swiping down from the top of the display gives you quick touch-based access to any smart home devices you've already set up through Google Home. I could quickly switch on or off any Philips Hue light bulb or Belkin Wemo switch in my home, and for the bulbs, I could also swipe around to change brightness easily.

  You can also get the Google Home Hub to show you what's happening on a Nest camera if you've got one, although here one of the Home Hub's limitations becomes apparent. There's an onboard microphone, but no camera, which means you can't visually interact with any smart home video devices in a two-way sense.

  It also means you can't take or make video calls, although voice calling via Google Duo is supported. The competing smart displays using Google Assistant are apparently using different code than the Google Home Hub, which might explain the disparity. Again, though, given how hard Google has tried to make Duo a viable video calling platform, it's downright odd that the Home Hub doesn't support it natively.

Verdict

Verdict

• Nicely built
• Intelligent use of video

Should you buy it?

Where the Amazon Echo Show 2nd Gen impressed me with its hardware, the Google Home Hub feels like more of a complete package, even without video calling. It responds more intelligently than Alexa to queries in the main, fits unobtrusively into most home environments and offers either a nice finishing point to an existing smart home speaker set-up or a great starting point for those wary of the complexity of voice-only smart speakers.

Alternatives

Smart displays are still in their infancy in Australia, with the majority of smart displays shown off at I/O still to emerge. If you're a Google Assistant-based smart home, the Google Home Hub is pretty much your only bet at the time of writing.

However, if you're using Amazon's Alexa, you have a pair of options. You can opt for the similarly small Amazon Echo Spot or the considerably larger Amazon Echo Show 2nd Gen.

You could achieve much of what the Google Home Hub does with a Google Assistant-based smartphone and simple Bluetooth speakers, although you wouldn't get quite as elegant an overall package if you did.

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