In photos: setting up the Nest Cam

Nest took the next step after its purchase of Dropcam yesterday by releasing a new monitoring camera, the Nest Cam. It's an unassuming little camera that looks a little like a gray Google Maps pin, with a simple heavy base and a microUSB port on the bottom. It records 1080p video at 30fps (a step up from the last Dropcam's 720p) with a 130-degree field of view, and you can subscribe to Nest Aware to store up to 30 days of footage in the cloud. You can also set up Activity Zones so you'll be alerted if something moves in a certain portion of your frame.

Nest claims that you can set it up in less than 60 seconds and, well, that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to test. So we started our stopwatch (not really) and got down to it. The thing that took the longest with the Nest Cam was dealing with our relatively poor Wi-Fi in the corner of the office we chose to install it. So 60 seconds from unboxing to live video streaming to your iPhone is totally doable if you've got solid Wi-Fi (and Wi-Fi also seems to be a requirement for non-grainy video, I think).

We'll have a full review of the Nest Cam soon, but in the meantime here are some photos of the device and notes about the setup process.