sometimes you'll see this device labeled as the Google home mini second edition
sometimes you'll see it named the Google Nest Mini sometimes you'll just see it
named the Mini but whatever it's called there are some key differences between
this Nest Mini and the original Google Home Mini
hello Automaters, thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from Automate Your Life and
today I'm going to take the frustration out of automation by giving you some
clarity around these two devices now I'm not just going to explain the key
differences which I will do but I will also explain how some of the upgrades
from the original version the Google home mini help you as an Automator and
as someone who has a smart home with this second device henceforth we're just
gonna call it the nest mini and this one will be called the home mini as we roll
through the video let's start with look and feel because that's pretty easy now
in terms of the two devices they look exactly the same size and they are the
same size and really the big difference between the two of them this is a new
color called sky blue now unfortunately you lose one of my favorite colors from
the original home mini devices which was the aqua color so that's kind of being
replaced by this sky blue the other big difference between these devices as I
picked them up you can see the mounting hardware right here and that's really
about it in terms of the physical differences there's one more with the
power adapter that we'll talk about in a little bit there are eight additional
grams of weight in the Nest Mini over the Google Home Mini and that in itself
really doesn't matter but there are hardware upgrades that do matter to you
and the first one to talk about you know is really that speaker and this device
sounded from from the very first time I heard it it sounded a little bit tinny a
little bit hollow and I think it continues to sound that way especially
as we get better devices now the nest mini sounds according to Google a
hundred percent better on that low end and I would agree with that evaluation
but what it means to you is you can sit and listen to a much more
well-rounded device when when you play music on the nest mini I don't think
you're going to feel like you're missing a lot in terms of audio quality
especially if you go and use the new feature which is available on both of
these two stereo pair the devices it's going to sound really good so let's have
a listen in the difference between these two
now there is another hardware upgrade in terms of a third far-field microphone on
the new nest mini so this is over and above the two that are sitting here on
the Google home Mini but what you have really is the intention that this device
can hear you better and while I haven't really noticed a difference here in
terms of these two devices hearing me what I have noticed is it's a little bit
better again and I noticed this with the nest hub max over the nest hub and some
of the older devices is the accuracy has improved a little bit and the other
thing is I think that third microphone is intended to hear you better when the
music is playing and it's really loud in the room what's the time
it's 1058 what's the weather it's minus seven and partly cloudy today it'll be
mostly sunny with a forecast it now there's also a new feature on the nest
Mini called ultrasonic sensing and really what this means to you is some
controls or all the controls show up the little LEDs as you approach this speaker
and if the music is playing it will show you where the controls are so it's an
easy quick tap if you'd like to adjust the volume or start and stop music and
that's something that is also different here you can tap to adjust the volume
but you can start and stop music here by tapping on the top of the nest Mini that
was an original feature here but was actually removed from the Google home
many due to a security concern and it never came back but it is there here and
that ultrasonic capability that that sensing ability to know when you've come
up close to the device is going to be used in a couple of other ways going
forward that this device just isn't going to be able to keep up with see as
we go into the next version of what Google calls the helpful home what we're
going to see is more and more monitoring being done by your Google Nest and
Google home products now the nest aware subscription service has really been
repaired what I'll say you used to spend a lot of money on the nest cameras to
get them to record to the cloud now what's also coming into that is
some of the sensing features that are available on devices like the nest mini
in the new nest hub max and actually on the nest hub the existing version of
this now so you're going to be able to sense when people come up to a device
and let's say you're gone and your feature is turned on that basically
you're out of the home and it's guarding your home it's going to be able to sense
that someone is in the space and it's also going to be listening with those
three far-field microphones and all of this can be done locally with some of
the new hardware processing capabilities that is here on the nest mini that's a
new quad core 64 AR M CPU sitting on this device and its intention is well I
think it's like three or fourfold here and there's probably a couple I don't
know about but on the nest many the intention is to be able to do some
processing locally so some of those alerts that we talked about that will
look a lot like Amazon's guard capability where they can monitor your
home on top of that there will be local processing capabilities in terms of
executing things in your smart home and basic requests will also be available
locally on this device so there's a ton of this local control coming to this
device that just will not be possible here with the Google home Mini and what
that means to you as a smart home owner or someone who owns one of these devices
is speed so there's always a delay whenever I ask for something to happen
in my smart home and you've seen it probably hundreds of times in your own
home already and that's because this goes to the
cloud but with some of these local processing capabilities that will happen
very quickly just with your internal network being the speed at which you can
execute those commands now those last few things the nest aware the local
processing the local handling of many of your requests those things are still
theoretical Google has not actually put out that capability yet we will see it
in early to mid 2020 is the spectating at this point so keep that in
mind when I talk about those things still theoretical there are some
differences in connectivity now there's no difference in terms of Wi-Fi 2.4 and
5 gigahertz connections are capable here on the Google home Mini and you have
that same capability here but bluetooth has been upgraded so this is 4.1
Bluetooth on the home Mini and 5.0 Bluetooth and the reason I mentioned
that is its security its privacy it is important to have this newer version of
Bluetooth something that a lot of people talk about being a concern from a
security point of view is some of these older Bluetooth devices now there's also
a little bit of a difference in terms of the chromecast ability so right now when
you when you go and you look at the the website the tech specs here Google is
very careful with the language here so they say this is a chromecast capable
device and it has chromecast Audio built in this has chromecast built in and what
that means is both sides of the the capability so video and music now today
you can still you still cannot cast to a nest mini with music and video but the
hardware capability is there and what that might mean here in the very new
future this is kind of what I'm expecting we should see the ability to
either cast the audio from video files from say YouTube and all of their
different casting services and then maybe cast the video to another
chromecast built in device at the same time and be able to use these as home
theater speakers like we've seen Amazon do with their fire TV sticks and echo
devices there's one key difference and I talked I just touched on the power
adapter situation here early on in the video there is a big difference here
this is a USB power adapter so you can see right there that's USB into the back
of that device now here is a pretty standardized this is what you get
the nest hub the nest hub max this is the same power adapter and what this
means is a lot of people were powering their Google home Mini by a USB port and
unfortunately this had some unintended consequences and I want to explain why
Google went ahead and made this design adjustment so when Google put this out a
lot of people were really excited that they could go and use all kinds of USB
adapters to power this device and I think it was a good move by Google at
the time but what ended up happening is people started under powering this
device and there's lots of USB adapters that say one amp well this is 1.8 amps
and so is this actually or I think it is but regardless this is 1.8 amps at 5
volts and so what happened is a lot of people underpowered the device just a
little bit in some cases just at that 1.5 amp level and what it did is kind of
twofold so the voice assistance started acting up and that's because you were
slightly under powering the processor your sight slightly under powering
everything on this device and in lots of cases people ask me why is my Google
home rebooting whenever I play music really loudly on the device and the
reason was you were actually dropping the power enough enough to have it shut
off and the other thing that this did is it caused hardware failure so in both
cases Google was getting bad pressed by people under powering their device so
what do you do in the next version of the product you eliminate those bad
those bad press components so yes a lot of people have complained about this
they don't like it but what I hope you're hearing as I go through all of
this is that the hardware has been significantly improved over here that is
what has happened and while the speaker is the initial thing that you will get
access to that as way better what will happen over the next year or so is that
the reason to upgrade will become really clear as
some of these other new features roll out so I do really like this approach by
Google in terms of a market strategy you can still have this device this device
is going to continue to work but if you want some of these new features you will
need this new hardware and that is really the reason they went to a second
edition it was to support these upgrades in terms of their platform in terms of
their smart home capabilities and really to support the future and those those
features that maybe they didn't know about when they first released this
first Google home Mini so I hope this has explained the whole situation to you
I hope it's really clear if it's not go ahead leave comments down below
questions we answer as many as we can usually we get to everyone otherwise if
you need to understand a little bit more about this device I have a playlist up
on screen that will help you with that otherwise guys thanks for watching and
of course don't hate automate