Nest Doorbell (Wired, 3rd Gen) Review: Is It Worth the Upgrade?

This has been one of the most anticipated Nest products for me—finally, a higher-resolution wired doorbell. Google sent me the new 3rd-gen Nest Doorbell to test, and here’s how it stacks up compared to the first-gen Nest Hello and the 2nd-gen.

Installation was straightforward. Just make sure you’re drilling into something solid to mount the plate. Attaching the doorbell is easy, but the latch requires everything to be perfectly level. The top screw is a bit finicky and can drop out —in my case it fell into the river rocks, but thankfully Google included a spare.

If you’re coming from a Nest Doorbell second-gen–you can reuse the mounting plate as it’s the exact same with the third-gen. This makes for a super easy install.

This time around, you can only use the Google Home app (the Nest app is officially done for). I’m still adjusting to it, but you can access the familiar Nest-style timeline. If you want 24/7 continuous recording, though, you’ll need a Google Home Premium plan—which isn’t cheap at $26/month or $260/year.

On the plus side, Google’s Gemini AI is built in to provide smarter alerts and summaries. You can also search video history with plain language to ask Gemini what it has seen. We haven’t received an automated Home Brief yet, but that may be because we’ve only had the doorbell installed for a couple of days. But asking Gemini manually about my home brief did give a summary of what happened the day before (it’s supposed to automatically arrive in the Activity tab in the evening):

On Thursday morning, a person delivered a package to the front porch. In the afternoon, a resident entered the house via the Front Door doorbell. Later, a thorough yard maintenance session took place, involving someone mowing the lawn, sweeping the porch, trimming grass with a weed trimmer, and clearing the porch and yard with a leaf blower. Another person delivered a white package to the Front Door doorbell in the evening. Early Friday morning, a cat was observed walking across the Front Door doorbell porch multiple times.

So how accurate was this AI summary brief? It wasn’t perfect, but it’s a start for sure. The person delivering a package in the morning was actually a kid leaving for school, and the cat walking across the porch was actually a family of raccoons at night (probably trying to find grubs)–close enough (and not bad with night vision picking it up).

From left to right below, zoomed in: Nest Hello, Nest Doorbell (2nd gen), Nest Doorbell (3rd gen). You can see the image quality difference and how hard it is to keep plants alive:

Design-wise, it looks almost identical to the previous version, so nothing shocking there. The big upgrade is the new 2K resolution. Image quality is noticeably sharper with more detail and a wider field of view—great for seeing packages at the door. Audio is still excellent, picking up voices clearly even from the street, thanks to noise cancellation.

When someone rings the doorbell, with visitor announcements enabled your Google Nest speaker will broadcast. In settings, you can set up “familiar faces” and add a name to people. Their names will then be broadcast in the future. If you tap and hold on notifications on iOS when someone rings the doorbell, you get a video preview and three automated reply options such as “you can just leave it”, “we’ll be right there” and “no one can come to the door.”

Notifications are AI summaries and you’ll see something like, “cat walks across porch” and “cat walks by”, so it’s pretty specific.

Within the Google Home app, under an activity, if you tap on the familiar faces icon, it gives you an AI description. “A person in a black jacket and pants exits the house. The person stands on the porch.” This was fairly accurate, except my jacket was navy—and I swear I was wearing pants.

Here’s the Nest Doorbell 3rd-gen from its default view and fully zoomed in on the right. You can see the new square 2K sensor giving a 1:1 aspect ratio and wider 166-degree field of view (versus 145-degrees before). You can really capture anyone approaching the front door from head to toe. HDR video is recorded at 30fps. There are six infrared LEDs for night vision up to 10 feet away.

There’s also a zoom and crop feature where you can zoom in and save the camera view. This lets you focus on a certain spot and anything outside of that view will not be detected and recorded.

Zooming into footage still isn’t super crisp, but it’s an improvement. Night vision works well and the 2K upgrade definitely helps in low light. You can set up motion zones, and when someone rings, it triggers alerts across your Google devices and speakers.

As for some other tidbits, Wi-Fi remains at 802.11ac, the same as before.

The jump to 2K resolution makes this a worthwhile upgrade if you’re coming from the first or second-gen Nest doorbells. Just be ready to say goodbye to the Nest app, and budget for that pricey subscription if you want 24/7 recording (the wife is happy with 24/7 recording unlike Ring’s limitation of every 15 seconds between event recordings). Otherwise, it’s a solid step forward for now until we see a 4K sensor, hopefully in the future.

You can click here to buy the Google Nest Doorbell 2K for $239.99, available in Hazel, Linen or Snow. The price hasn’t gone up in three years, which is a win these days with inflation driving up the cost of almost everything else.