Nest Cam Outdoor: Elegant design company launches comeback with beautifully-crafted camera

This could be the ultimate, elegant solution for home security – so long as it stays safe from pigeons and ne'er-do-wells

Nest, the US company known for its elegant products including a wireless smoke alarm and a thermostat that learns your behaviour has today announced a new security camera. There was already a product called Nest Cam but now here’s an outdoor version called, get this, Nest Cam Outdoor.

The new model is due to arrive in the UK before the end of the year, though it’ll be out in September in the States. One of the reasons Nest came up with this new model is it found that many of its customers had put the older model on windowsills pointing outdoors and the results were limited thanks to reflections, for instance.

Many of the features on the new Nest are just what you’d expect from the current indoor version: slick styling, effective camera elements such as night vision of up to seven metres distance and software that enables the gadget to contact you when it spots something amiss.

I took a behind-the-scenes look at the Nest Cam Outdoor earlier in the week and it feels impressive: tactile, solid and beautifully crafted. Even down to the off-white cable which Nest had to design from the ground up as products designed to be robust enough to withstand the weather invariably used tougher cable cladding that was only available in black.

One of the first things you notice, though, is the wire coming out of the bottom of the unit. Nest told me it would love to make it wireless but it’s not technically possible yet and anyway if you had to replace a battery every few weeks, you’d probably lose interest in using it. You could chase the cable into the wall it’s mounted on, though some will still be visible.

You can swivel the cable to the top of the unit if you need to, and software turns the image the correct way up automatically. The camera is held in place on a base unit that is screwed into the wall. But the camera attaches to the base magnetically, which gives maximum flexibility to how you position the camera. But it does seems less secure.

I’ve tried the magnet and it is remarkably hard work separating the two parts so it won’t be routinely dislodged. Nevertheless, a determined intruder could pull it free. This is only a worry if you position it where someone could reach it. The product has been designed to deter pigeons sitting on it, by the way.

The camera can stream footage in Full HD 1080p video. The software is designed so it sends you a message if it sees something suspicious. Additionally, you can upgrade to a service called Nest Aware for £8 a month (or £80 a year) which saves footage to the cloud which you can trawl through. There’s even an option to watch a timelapse of a whole day, concertina-ed into 90 seconds.

Just as the Nest smoke alarm is sophisticated enough to tell steam apart from smoke, the camera software here, Nest says, can tell whether the movement it’s spotted is benign (like a tree blowing in the wind) or not.

If it sees someone lurking on your doorstep (whether that’s someone trying to break in, leaving a parcel or playing Pokemon Go), a speaker grille on the camera lets you talk to that person. An intruder will most likely think you’re at home and run, the delivery guy can hear where to leave his package and the gamer can be politely told there are no Pikachus here.

More features will be added when the product is launched, like the Person Alerts, when they’ll work on the indoor camera, too.

The price hasn’t been announced but I’d expect it to be in line with the current indoor model, which is £159.

Nest’s products are efficient and pleasing, with lots of features and sophistications. This will be a great security product - so long as that magnetic attachment is out of reach of ne’er-do-wells.