Google Nest Mini Review and tear down – See and hear the improvements

Cons

• No lines out
• Additional microphone brings no noticeable improvement

It’s been three years since Google launched the first Google Home speaker, with its tapered, cylindrical shape. Less than a year later, the cheap Home Mini was released, which was soon available for less than fifty euros. This was the product with which Google wanted to conquer the voice-controlled smart home market. After all, once you have a Google Assistant speaker at home, there is a good chance that you will expand the Google smart home network and a lot smaller that you will switch to Apple or Amazon.

In February 2018, Apple only responded with the much more expensive high-end HomePod and Amazon had been present in this market for longer than Google, also with the small and affordable Echo Dot.

The popular Home Mini now has a successor, which looks the same, but has various internal improvements. We have therefore placed both speakers side by side to find out how big the differences are and whether it might even be worth replacing your Home Mini with a Nest Mini. We also opened up the Minis to see internally what differentiates the Nest Mini from the Home Mini. In this review, we mainly discuss the improvements over the first generation and do not elaborate on the functionality of Google Assistant or the privacy aspects, which we have already covered. However, it should be clear that you should not put a Google Nest Mini in your house if you do not trust Google with your data.

Look for the differences

From the outside, there isn’t much difference between the Home Mini and the Nest Mini. The biggest difference is at the rear; the new Nest Mini has a hole so you can hang it. That can be useful, because if you look at the speaker at the same height or slightly above, you will not see the LED lights that indicate, for example, whether the speaker is listening to you. In practice, it can be quite difficult to find a surface on which to place the speaker in such a way that you can see the lights from wherever you want.

In addition, the port to which you have to connect the power supply has changed. This is now a round connection for a power supply, where it used to be a micro USB port. We would have preferred to see a USB-C connection, since you are more likely to have a USB-C cable lying around than such a round one for a possible replacement. On the other hand, the cable will not break so quickly, since you basically just leave it in there. A port that is still missing is the line out . You cannot send the sound of the Nest Mini to another sound source, which is a shame, because a speaker like this does not sound great. You can make a stereo pair of several Nest Minis, as well as with other Home speakers, but that does not improve the sound quality of course.

The speaker also looks the same, but according to Google, the Nest Mini is made more from recycled materials than its predecessor. The speaker fabric is made entirely of recycled plastic and the rest of the housing for about 35 percent. However, the material does not feel any different and looks the same. Google is clearly pleased with the earlier design.

However, there are more lights in the housing. In addition to the four round, colored LEDs in the middle, there are now also two LEDs on the side, directly opposite each other. These serve to show you where to tap to change the volume. As far as we’re concerned, it would have been nice if you could set these lights to turn on when the speaker is listening to you, because then you don’t have to hang it up or put it on a surface lower than yourself to see that.

Service

The operation of the smart speaker has also changed. The old one only had functioning touchpads on the sides, but the new one also has a touchpad in the middle. The Home Mini secretly had that too, but it didn’t function properly, after which it was turned off with a software update. Nest Mini’s center panel lets you stop media playback, hang up a call, or turn off an alarm or timer. That was also possible with the Home Mini, but with the side buttons, due to the lack of a functioning middle surface. There is no longer a reset button on the Nest Mini. Now you have to hold down the center touch pad for fifteen seconds to reset it to factory settings.

With the Nest Mini, the side buttons light up as soon as you get close. That surprised us a bit at first, because how does he know you’re around? The answer appears to be an ultrasonic sensor. This sends out a high-frequency sound pulse each time and the speaker registers how long it takes until it receives it again. If the impulse comes back earlier than usual and therefore bounces off something, the Nest Mini knows that someone is probably nearby and turns on the lights of the volume buttons. That is a great addition, because that way you know exactly where to tap.

Another innovation in the Nest Mini is that it contains a machine learning chip. Unfortunately, that is only useful if you use it in the United States and that is a pity. The chip must ensure that Assistant can answer faster or take action on commands that you often give. This teaches the Nest Mini, after which it no longer needs to communicate with the cloud for these commands. Too bad it doesn’t work here, but at least it gives an insight into where Google wants to go with smart speakers and ambient computing .

One more microphone

We were happy to hear that the Nest Mini has an extra microphone compared to the Home Mini. It is a far field microphone and the other two are also. Such a microphone is, just as the name suggests, designed to pick up sounds well from a distance. According to Google, the added microphone helps to better distinguish ambient sounds from the voice that needs to be recognized. We tested that, among other things.

We put a Home Mini and a Nest Mini side by side on a table and came up with several tests that could differentiate this second-generation Mini from the first-generation. First we have phrases like “Hey Google, how are you?” and “Hey Google, what’s the weather like in Zanzibar today” so we can play it at the same volume over and over, to keep it fair.

We then muted one Mini and let the other listen. Then we played the phrases at low volume a few times, and then increased the volume one step at a time until the Mini responded. We repeated that a few times, and the results were consistent: no difference. We then also did this with the volume remaining the same, but where we always moved a step closer. Again, the results were exactly the same. Both speakers understood us well once they listened.

According to Google, however, it is an improvement in the registration of voices with noises. So we used a phone and a Bluetooth speaker and played repetitive music and buzz at different distances from the Google speakers. We then tested with the sound fragment in the same way as just described whether or not the smart speakers recognized our voice and actually understood it. Here too, the results were very consistent and striking enough: exactly the same with both speakers. There is, however, a certain distance at which the speaker understands you one time and not the other, which makes sense. However, this border area turned out to be very small in practice and also the same for both Minis.

So we are left with the question of what exactly has been improved with the addition of the extra microphone. In any case, we could not find it.

Sound quality

Another important area where the Google Nest Mini has improved over its predecessor is the low frequency range. In short: it has more bass. Fortunately, we can confirm that. If you put the Minis side by side and listen to them alternately with the same piece of music, where we used a range of different songs, you will notice that the Nest Mini does indeed have more bass. It’s not so much that the Mini plays all low frequencies at a higher volume, but the low frequency range that can be heard is especially larger. As a result, you not only hear the bass drum, but also the layer that is sometimes still below it in terms of frequency, as you hear with Björk’s song Hyperballad in the recordings below. Especially that makes the Nest Mini sound a lot fuller than its predecessor.

According to Google, this has not been at the expense of the sound of the mid and high frequencies. We agree. In fact, these sound a bit less shrill and therefore more beautiful. The sound quality is therefore the area in which the Nest Mini has improved the most in our opinion, although we would not immediately throw away our Home Mini and replace it with a Nest Mini, unless you listen to music a lot on the speaker. However, do not expect miracles from this mini speaker, because it is of course certainly no replacement for your sound system. But as an extra speaker for the kitchen or bedroom, it is acceptable. This is especially true if you place or hang the Nest Mini close to a wall. It is designed for that and it saves quite a bit of bass volume.

We’ve pulled out our best directional mic to show off the difference in sound quality between the Home Mini and the Nest Mini. In the sound clip below you can hear the Nest Mini playing the same part of a song first and then the Home Mini. You will hear the difference best on a sound source that is as natural as possible, but you can probably also hear the difference on a less good speaker or headphones.

We’ve pulled out our best directional mic to show off the difference in sound quality between the Home Mini and the Nest Mini. In the sound clip below you can hear the Nest Mini playing the same part of a song first and then the Home Mini. You will hear the difference best on a sound source that is as natural as possible, but you can probably also hear the difference on a less good speaker or headphones.

Mini tear down

We came across a tear-down of the Google Home Mini in various places on the internet, but not of the Nest Mini. That is why we decided to open both speakers ourselves to compare them and of course simply because we can. The Home Mini turned out to be a lot easier to open than the Nest Mini. With the first generation it is a matter of putting a heat gun on the plate at the bottom and popping a thin metal plate in between. This way you get the round orange plate off and the torx screws are already underneath it.

We had more trouble with the Nest Mini and that is clearly visible in the photos. In the hole where you can hang the speaker, you first have to remove the white rubber to expose a torx screw. However, when we unscrewed this, there still seemed to be no movement in the two halves of the speaker. The trick is to turn them clockwise, which we tried right away, but which still required quite a bit of force on our copy. So we first started applying some brute force techniques. That’s why the speaker looks quite battered.

Once we open it, we see that with the Home Mini, Google still found it necessary to bounce the sound to the sides via a small cone-shaped ‘pimple’, which is right above the speaker. This is absent from the Nest Mini and we have to say we didn’t miss it in terms of sound. Another difference is that, as you might expect with more bass, the Google Nest Mini’s speaker has a larger voice coil, which can be seen in the larger dust cap. This ensures more excursion and therefore more air that is set in motion. This is the middle part with the ball of the speaker.

We see a few interesting things on the Nest Mini’s circuit board. For starters, the extra microphone is clearly visible. We circled the three microphones in red. It is a pity that we have not observed better performance, despite this additional microphone, but unfortunately we cannot make more of it.

Circled in magenta you see the DDR3 memory with a capacity of 4GB. We also see the Nest Mini’s nand storage memory circled in blue. The Nest Mini uses that memory, among other things, to decipher voice commands on the device itself, instead of via the cloud. To do that, the Nest Mini also has a more advanced soc. It’s an AS370 from Synaptics and we’ve circled it in yellow. This soc has the machine learning capabilities needed to recognize voice commands you use frequently. Unfortunately, as mentioned, this only works in the United States.

In the Home Mini we find the Marvell Armada 1500 Mini Plus-soc (88DE3006). It is also in the second generation Chromecast and Chromecast Audio, so Google bought in a lot at the time. You will also see two microphones and an LED driver on the PCB of the Home Mini. In the last photo, which shows the back, you can also see how Google ensures that the light of the LEDs is separated from these devices. For that, the inverted E.

Conclusion

If you are now going to get a small speaker from Google, choose the newer Nest Mini and not the first-generation Home Mini, even if you have to pay ten or fifteen euros more for it. We recommend this for one reason and that is the improved sound quality of the Nest Mini, especially in the low frequencies. The difference is clear, so hopefully we have been able to let you hear it well.

Only if you hardly use the Mini to play music, you might as well get a Home Mini. Despite frantic efforts, we have not been able to find that the Nest Mini understands you better, even with another sound source nearby, and that should be a prominent improvement point of the Nest Mini. The Nest Mini would also have to learn commonly used voice commands and then process them on the device itself, instead of first communicating with Google’s servers, but that only works in the United States.

In addition, there are not many improvements left that make a big difference. You can hang the new speaker more easily, the Bluetooth version is newer and the operation has been slightly improved. In addition, the extra LED lights for the volume control with ultrasonic sensor are worth mentioning, but these are details in our opinion. There is still no line out and the new connection for the power supply is not progress. We would have preferred a USB-C connection.

However, let’s keep it simple. The most important points of a speaker like this are that it understands you and that it sounds as good as possible. The first has not improved, but the second has. All in all, you don’t have to swap your Home Mini for a Nest Mini unless you listen to a lot of music on it. However, we hope that in the rooms where you prefer to listen to music, you have better sound sources than a small speaker like this.