Google Nest Ceiling Fan is all-in-one smart hub that ties together all devices in your smart home

I’m sure the concept of smart home has already touched you. And you have thermostats, smart lights and many other smart devices set up at home trying to do their bit. Standalone, all these smart products would do a great deal in making life simpler, but unfortunately, having different devices doing their tasks can become slightly cluttered and cumbersome. To add more finesse to a modern home, a Nest Ceiling Fan – designed for Google’s collective of smart home devices – has been embedded with a range of these devices to eliminate the clutter and make your chick ceiling fan the ultimate smart home hub.

Just like our appliances, ceiling fans have also received smart treatment in the past. The Nest Ceiling fan is a productive and more interesting take on the other smart fans that can only be turned on and off through a smart assistant. This new adaptation of a ceiling fan designed for the Google Nest lineup has been conceived as an all-in-one smart hub that would tie up all the smart products you have spread across each room in the house. The compact and stylish two-fin fan with omni-directional speaker, smart light bulb, sensors for the thermostat, and a smoke detector and alarm will replace each of the mentioned devices for good and leave you with a single contact point to create an interesting smart home setup.

Designer: Joseph Morlote

Arguably, ceiling fans offer a very limited cooling relief. If you live in a warmer climate, you’d definitely prefer air conditioning over a ceiling fan; though using a ceiling fan with an air conditioner will help improve efficiency and eventually allow you to lower the energy costs. There is no denying the fact that fans carry out cooling at a much cheaper price point and therefore a fan dangling from the ceiling in the center of the room is a nice vantage point to perhaps act as a unified hub for all your smart home requirements.

As a ceiling fan with a smart speaker, light, thermostat and spoke detector onboard, the Nest Ceiling Fan will allow you to interact through the Google Assistant/app to just one device, thus ensuring you don’t need these products installed separately anywhere in the house. Providing a perfect balance of performance and smart design, this fan in addition to offering cool air, will disperse music from your playlist in every direction of the room with a click of a button or your voice command.

Ideal for replacing the smart light bulb and traditional wall switches, you are using, the ceiling fan has its own LED light bulb that contains software to connect to a smart home assistant, an app, or some other mobile devices and can automate your lights so you can control it remotely. It is also embedded with a thermostat to automate the central heating system or an integrated smart smoke detector that can alert everyone with a warning alarm in case of a fire in the house.

It is a prerequisite for the multifunctional Google Nest Ceiling Fan to be equipped with microphones so that it can hear your commands to the Google Assistant from across the room. However, the microphone could be used for eavesdropping! Smart home products including those from Google, are notorious for constantly listening to our conversations, as they are always on the lookout for wake word “Hey Google.” I’m assuming, the fan will not include a camera as sitting right above the head it would have a terrible vantage point, so the risk of privacy breach there is lower. But even if we were to consider that the microphones would have compromised reception (owing to their high positioning), the mics will be listening to us perpetually and storing information in the cloud. You would have to make an effort to turn the mics off when not required, which could limit the fan’s productivity as smart hub around the clock.

The otherwise effectively designed Nest Ceiling Fan comes in the existing color theme of Google products, which is guaranteed to lighten up the mood and blend with the interiors of the room where it is installed. The installation is going to be somewhat complicated with all the wiring and drilling required, but that’s going to be the case with any ceiling fan, and it’s only a one-time cost for your smart home’s future with a ceiling fan hub as smart as this.

The post Google Nest Ceiling Fan is all-in-one smart hub that ties together all devices in your smart home first appeared on Yanko Design.

These clever oven-trays come with an extended lip that makes them easy to hold

This is a handle-appreciation post. As someone who’s dropped his fair share of cookies (and one lasagna) because oven-trays aren’t easy to grip, more so when they’re hot and you’re wearing gloves, it seems plain counterintuitive that oven trays, pans, and casseroles don’t have larger gripping surfaces.

The Nest Oven tins feature a simple innovation that solves a familiar problem – removing hot oven dishes whilst wearing thick & cumbersome oven-gloves. A specially designed lip on the front of the tray makes it easier to pull the tray out of the oven, and wide handles on the side let you hold the tray once it’s out of the oven… you know, so you don’t risk fumbling with your tray of food, much like Kevin with his famous chili. And here’s the best part – like all of the products in the Joseph Joseph Nest™ line, the oven tins nest right within each other for easy storage!

Designer: Tej Chauhan for Joseph Joseph

What we bought: Our favorite gadgets of 2020

2020 was a rough year, which is probably why several Engadget editors exercised quite a bit of retail therapy over the past 12 months. We purchased a wide assortment of things, including an Aerogarden, a 4K monitor, an air purifier and Nintendo’s Rin...

The Google Home Max is half off for Black Friday this year

Google’s smart speakers and displays have steadily improved over the years, and luckily for us, a few of them are on sale for Black Friday. The biggest discount by far is the Google Home Max, which is now selling for $149.99, a whopping 50 percent of...

The Google Nest Audio smart-speaker gets its own detachable Walkie-Talkie with a touch display

Chris Barnes’ conceptual Google device caters to the niche audience that needs connectivity the most, but struggle to keep up with technology or to avoid the complications associated with advanced tech. The Google Home Phone is a fusion of the Google Home smart-speaker (now the Nest Audio smart-speaker) and the Google Pixel), but its spiritual ancestor is, in fact, the landline phone. Designed to be a smart device with a dockable receiver or ‘phone’, the Google Home Phone lets the elderly connect with their relatives and friends who are also a part of the Google ecosystem. Once set up, the Home Phone works like a smart speaker, allowing you to ask for help, access information, or contact people, while the detachable ‘handset’ functions as the receiver on a landline, allowing you to lift it off the base and talk to people, not just using audio, but using video too!

The Home Phone is an incredibly interesting concept for a whole bunch of reasons. For starters, Barnes envisions it as a “better”, smarter, and wireless version of a landline, allowing you to contact people without remembering phone numbers, see who’s calling (via Google’s contact database), be unencumbered by coiled wires, and easily avoid robocalls (thanks to Google’s incredible spam-detection AI). The touchscreen display on the detachable unit serves as a visual aid, allowing the elderly to tap icons without navigating confusing interfaces… and accessibility features like adjustable font-sizes make it easy for people with visual impairment.

Personally, the Google Home Phone gets a bunch of things right with its form factor. Not only is the dockable receiver + base interaction very reminiscent of the landline telephone (in fact the receiver can be held to one’s ear like a conventional phone too), but its circular ‘phone’ also ticks two arguably important boxes. The circular form-factor is rather comfortable to hold in any angle (a great win for people with dexterity issues), but at the same time, dock it onto its base and it also resembles a magical crystal ball, which believe it or not, is a familiar silhouette that also cleverly ties into the magical ability for the circular screen to really display anything, from faces of loved ones, to the time, weather, messages, and even Map routes!

Barnes even fleshed out the Home Phone concept to make sure it’s a practical systems solution (and not just a pretty concept). The base sports a wired connection (so you never have to worry about batteries), and features a powerful smart-speaker that’s easy to talk to. The dockable ‘phone’ sits loosely on top of the base, with ‘no fixed docking position’, which means the elderly never have to worry about making sure they’ve placed the receiver the right way. As soon as the phone and hub are in proximity, the hub begins wirelessly charging the phone. The phone-unit also comes with a notch of its own, featuring a powerful camera system that enables two-way video communication. Not only does it mean the elderly can have video conferences with their friends, family, caretakers, and medical staff, it also enables the latter to keep a watchful eye on their elderly wards by allowing the Google Home Phone to function as a home-camera.

Designer: Chris Barnes

The Google Nest Clock puts a sleek, informative smart-display on your wall

If you’ve got Google‘s slew of products around your home, there’s a lot of information you can access right at your fingertips, from the time of the day to the weather, weekly forecast, indoor temperature, your appointments, new email notification, to mention a few. The Google Nest Clock concept gives you a display to view that information on the wall of your house, offering a better alternative to browsing through your phone, or asking your Google Nest Home smart-speaker and having it narrate things in audio back to you.

The Google Nest Clock concept builds on the design format of the Nest thermostat, but strips away the thermostat functions and just makes it a sleek, elegant-looking clock. With a variety of clock-faces, and the ability to lay out crucial information for you, from the weather to what the traffic looks like on the way to work, the Nest Clock provides the experience of having a smart-display you can speak commands to.

Think of the Google Nest Clock as a smartwatch, but bigger. It plugs into an outlet using a USB-C connection and hangs on the wall, with a perpetually on display giving you the time, date, weather, and a lot of other information. Just like a smart-speaker, you can talk to your clock too, telling it to change its face-style, asking it to display family photos, having it notify you if you get a new email, or of your daily appointments, or just display motivational quotes. The fact that it has a dynamic display means the Nest Clock works anywhere in any sort of home. You can choose between informative, minimalist, or decorative clock-faces, just like you can with a smart-watch, and at the same time, you can even tell your Nest Clock to control various aspects of your smart home for you, from setting the thermostat to switching on/off the lights, to potentially even asking it to display who’s at the front door!

Designer: Abdelrahman Shaapan