14 DAY TRIAL // Google purchased Nest Labs in January 2014 for $3.2 billion (€2.8 billion) as part of its efforts to embrace the concept of connected homes, but now that more than 12 months have passed since the acquisition, the agreement doesn't seem to be fruitful at all.
Living proof is a video posted by a Google employee who himself is a customer of Nest and who installed smart smoke alarms in his house.
Brad Fitzpatrick, who works for Google since 2007 and participated in the development of several projects, including Android, published a clip on his YouTube account to show how a bunch of faulty Nest alarms could make anyone go crazy in a second.
“Friends” fans most likely recall “The One Where They're Up All Night,” when Phoebe Buffay has a hard time stopping her fire alarm from beeping and eventually breaks it down and throws it away in a blanket to get rid of the noise.
The almost same thing happens in this video with the Google employee, who can't stop the Nest fire alarms from beeping in every room of his house, so he eventually removes all of them, puts them all in a box, puts the box in another box, and yet, the beeping is still there.
“Do not buy a Nest Protect. You will regret it”
Although Nest is a Google-owned company and Fitzpatrick himself is also working for the search giant, he sees no issue in posting a fair comment on YouTube, recommending viewers to “not buy a Nest Protect” because they will regret it.
Nest Protect is a fire alarm system that monitors your home and can also send notifications to your Android smartphone, letting you know whenever smoke is detected. But they're not working right, it seems.
“They false alarm and are unhushable pieces of [expletive]. Please spread the word. Watch this horror video of me trying to quiet mine. You can stop or mute this video if it's annoying, but you cannot stop an actual Nest protect. This went off in my house all day, annoying my neighbors,” he posted.
Unsurprisingly, some of the YouTube viewers who actually ended up watching the video explained that they would never buy a Nest product and the reason is as simple as it could be: this is a fair review from someone who has no interest in badmouthing the smoke alarms.
So if you do want to buy Nest Protect, this video is clearly worth a look. But you might actually want to close it before it ends due to all the beeping, so turn your volume down, take a deep breath and click play. Consider yourself warned.
