The folks at Nest couldn’t have been happy to see their next project revealed through grubby photos used for technical certification, so tonight they sent out a proper image and teaser video of the new device.

If you’re looking for more information about exactly what it can do, they didn’t say, but based on the rumors that have surfaced since the original Google Home was discontinued, this “Prince” device is intended as a rival to the Sonos One. It’s still rocking a fairly simple design, although the extended fabric covering makes it a better style fit between the Mini and Max devices.

In many ways, the Google Home speaker is overdue for a refresh. Released in 2016 as a rival to Amazon’s Echo, it was the company’s first foray into smart speakers. It was soon overshadowed by the smaller Home Mini (now rebranded as the Nest Mini) and the aforementioned Home Max (which has yet to be renamed), which boasts a louder, deeper sound. Amazon has since released several more updates to its own Echo lineup, making the Google Home look relatively ancient by comparison. What’s more, ever since Sonos introduced support for Google Assistant, the Sonos One is often seen as the Google-powered smart speaker of choice. It would make sense for Google to want to offer its own take on a powerful smart speaker. 

Aside from the Pixel 4a, other Google hardware plans for 2020 include a possible Pixel 5 and an Android TV dongle codenamed Sabrina. It’s not clear yet when all of these will be revealed, but if rumors are to be believed, it’ll be some time this fall.

Buy Nest WiFi 2-pack on Best Buy – $200

Google’s past WiFi routers have had difficulty standing out, but the Nest WiFi’s inclusion of smart speaker functionality gives it an edge over some models. So long as you’re close to an access point, you can talk to Google Assistant. The system is also easy to set up, and the design is sleek enough that you might not feel compelled to hide it in a corner.

There are some limitations. There’s no Ethernet on the mesh points, so this won’t work if you need the bandwidth or low latency of a wired link. You also won’t get WiFi 6 speeds. This is for all-households where wireless convenience matters more than raw performance. If that sounds like your home, though, this might be just what you need.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Buy Google Home on Google Store – $29

The Home’s design may seem a bit old compared to newer Google smart speakers, but it’s still capable. It should sound better overall than the Nest Mini, and its customizable base lets you match it to your decor. Apart from that, the Home shares many things in common with more recent counterparts. Google Assistant remains a powerful AI helper that has improved over time (particularly for smart home integration), and it’s still a good choice if you like to cast audio from Google-friendly services. You won’t get stunning audio quality or a display, but at $30 it’s a better value than just about anything else in Google’s lineup — and rival speakers like Amazon’s Echo, for that matter.

The new handset keeps many of the things that people loved about the previous iPhone SE, in particular a 4.7-inch Retina display and a physical home button with Touch ID. But Apple brought over a lot of new things from more advanced iPhones as well, including wireless charging, a water- and dust-resistant design and the latest A13 Bionic chipset. The latter brings flagship-level computing to a budget smartphone, and that’s fantastic upgrade for anyone switching from an older iPhone to the new iPhone SE.

Buy iPhone SE on Apple starting at $399

Buy iPhone SE on Best Buy starting at $399

Buy iPhone SE on Walmart starting at $199

Google Pixel 4

You can still grab Google’s Pixel 4 for $450 and Pixel 4XL for $550 at Best Buy right now. We gave the Pixel 4 a score of 83 and the 4XL a score of 85 and there’s a lot to like about these handsets: they still have some of the best cameras you can get on a smartphone today, Google’s Motion Sense feature is great (when it works properly) and they both have good performance that’s enhanced by a “smooth” display feature that ramps up the refresh rate to 90Hz. The deal knocks $350 off each smartphone’s starting price, making it a good opportunity to get flagship smartphones at mid-range prices.

Buy Google Pixel 4 on Best Buy – $450

Buy Pixel 4XL on Best Buy – $550

Google Nest WiFi bundle

Bed Bath and Beyond continues to offer a discount on a Google Nest WiFi bundle, dropping the price to $200. The bundle includes a router and one access point, and it’s normally priced at $270. We gave the Nest WiFi system a score of 84 for its simple yet attractive design, easy installation process and its improved speed and reliability. Power-users may not appreciate the lack of support for WiFi 6, or the access point’s lack of Ethernet ports, but those are small prices to pay for an otherwise solid, easy-to-use mesh WiFi system.

Buy Nest WiFi bundle on Bed Bath and Beyond – $200

Amazon Echo

You can still snag the Amazon Echo for $60 at Best Buy and Amazon. This sale price is the same as the smart speaker’s Black Friday price, and we likely won’t see it drop to this price or lower again before Amazon Prime Day. The Echo’s solid audio quality and responsive mics led us to give it a score of 90. Both retailers are still offering a bundle option as well — add an Amazon Smart Plug to the order for only $10 more.

Buy Amazon Echo at Best Buy – $60

Google Home

Walmart still has the Google Home for $50. The Echo competitor typically goes for $75 to $100, so this is a great way to save money on one of the original Google Assistant smart speakers. You’ll get more powerful audio from the Google Home than you would the Google Home Mini, and it can do anything you could ask the Google Assistant to do: read weather reports, control smart home devices and music playback, set timers and create reminders.

Buy Google Home at Walmart – $50

New deal additions

Vantrue dash cams

Dash cam company Vantrue has discounts on some of its newest dash cams. You can get the Vantrue N2 Pro for $130 using the code VTCAMN2P at checkout. This model records both the road ahead of you while you’re driving and the inside of your car, making it useful for those who drive for ride-hailing services and those that may just want to record silly videos with their friends while on a road trip. Both the front- and rear-facing cameras record 1080p video, and the dash cam has infrared night vision and loop recording. Vantrue also has a more affordable option with a super capacitor, which allows the dash cam to record footage even when the car is off by connecting it via the OBD port. That model, the Vantrue T2, is only $100 using the code VTCAMT2S.

Buy Vantrue N2 Pro on Amazon – $130

Buy Vantrue T2 on Amazon – $100

Samsung Galaxy A50

One of Samsung’s budget smartphones is even more affordable right now — the Galaxy A50 is $200 at Best Buy. Normally priced at $350, this handset has a 6.4-inch FHD+ Super AMOLED display, a 4,000mAh battery and 64GB of storage that’s expandable up to 512GB. It was first released in developing markets, but Samsung decided to bring it to the states last year.

Buy Samsung Galaxy A50 on Best Buy – $200

DJI Osmo Mobile

DJI’s handy smartphone gimbal, the Osmo Mobile, is down to $100 on Amazon. Instead of buying a camera-and-gimbal combo device, you can stick your smartphone into this gadget and use its 3-axis stabilization to shoot smooth footage. This is the newest version of the Osmo Mobile that has an updated, foldable design that makes the accessory more travel-friendly.

Buy DJI Osmo Mobile on Amazon – $100

Anker Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro earbuds

Best Buy has a good deal on Anker’s Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro true wireless earbuds, dropping them to $130. These earbuds normally cost $150, and they are a good alternative to some of the big-name true wireless earbuds that often come with too-big price tags. The Liberty 2 Pros have 11mm dynamic drivers, four noise-cancelling mics that transmit your voice clearly when making a phone call, and Bluetooth 5.0 support. They also have 8 hours of run time and both USB-C and wireless charging capabilities.

Buy Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro on Best Buy – $130

Buy NVIDIA Shield TV at Best Buy – $130

Apple Watch Series 5

The latest model of the Apple Watch remains on sale at Best Buy for $350. Sales on the latest Apple Watch don’t come by often, and when they do, you typically won’t see the price drop more than this. The Series 5 has all of the stellar features of the previous Apple Watch models, and it has a few unique features including an always-on LTPO display, a built-in compass and international emergency calling.

Buy Apple Watch Series 5 at Best Buy – $350

Ableton Live 10

From now until May 30, you can get Ableton Live 10 audio production software for 30 percent off. This knocks the price of the Intro tier to $70, the Standard tier to $325 and the Suite tier to $525, making this deal better than what Ableton offered last Black Friday. A digital audio workstation like Live 10 is essential if you want to start making beats on your computer, and Ableton’s software lets you produce as well as perform your own music. If you’re not ready to take the plunge with Live 10, Ableton also increased its free-trial period from 30 days to 90 days. You can even get its Making Music instructional book for free, too (it normally costs $30 for a physical version).

Buy Ableton Live 10 starting at $70

Olympus E-M10 Mark II

Adorama still has a great deal on a mirrorless camera: get the Olympus O-MD E-M10 Mark II Micro Four Thirds with an M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R lens for $300. While this isn’t the latest model, it’s quite capable with its five-axis in-body stabilization, 16-megapixel sensor, tilting display and its 2.36-million-dot electronic viewfinder. The only downside is that it’s video recording abilities max out at 1080p at 60fps. Nevertheless, $300 for a mirrorless camera of this quality and a lens is a great deal.

Buy Olympus E-M10 II at Adorama – $300

Amazon Echo

The Amazon Echo is back down to its Black Friday price of $60 at Best Buy and Amazon. This smart speaker normally costs $100 and we sometimes see it drop close to $80. This is probably the best price we’ll see this Alexa speaker drop to before Amazon Prime Day. We gave the Echo a score of 90 for its solid audio quality, responsive mics and relatively affordable price. If you want to start a smart home ecosystem, you can add an Amazon Smart Plug to your order for only $10 more.

Buy Amazon Echo at Best Buy – $60

Sonos sale

Sonos is still offering discounts on some of its popular speakers. You can get the Sonos Beam soundbar for $350, the Sonos One for $150, and the Sonos One SL for $130. While all three sales are great, the $150 Sonos One is arguably the best option for most users, particularly those who want to start building a home sound system. We gave the Sonos One a score of 90, praising it for its excellent audio quality, subtle design and voice-assistant compatibility, among other things.

Buy Sonos Beam at Sonos – $350

Buy Sonos One at Sonos – $150

Buy Sonos One SL at Sonos – $130

New deal additions

Theragun sale

Let’s be honest – we could all use a massage right now. Theragun is offering up to $150 off its massage devices, knocking a decent amount off of the prices of its three models. The G3 Pro now costs $450, the G3 costs $350 and the Liv (currently sold out) costs $200. Originally made for professionals, Theragun machines deliver something close to deep-tissue massages that can be rejuvenating for your muscles. The more advanced the model, the more amplitude and speed settings you’ll get.

Shop Theragun sale

Google Home

Walmart has the Google Home for only $50 right now. This is a great deal because this smart speaker typically goes for $75 to $100, and has an original price of $120. One of the original Google Assistant speakers, the Google Home provides more robust audio than the Google Home Mini and it can control smart home devices, music playback and basically anything else you can ask the Google Assistant to manipulate.

Buy Google Home at Walmart – $50

Satechi spring sale

Accessory maker Satechi is having a site-wide spring sale from April 10 through April 12 – just use code SPRING15 to get 15 percent off your order. It’s a good opportunity to look for a USB-C hub, wireless mouse or keyboard (I use the aluminum Bluetooth keyboard often and love it) or laptop stand to level-up your home office.

Shop Satechi’s Spring sale

There is a workaround if you’re piping audio from your phone. Android Police noted that you can use the Google Home app to cast your phone’s audio over WiFi (through the speaker button). You’ll need an active internet connection, but it appears to be much more stable. You’re stuck if you use Bluetooth to send audio to other speakers, though.

The benefit of the feature was that guests didn’t need to be connected to the same WiFi network as the speaker — all they needed was a four digit PIN code. When Google first introduced the feature, it paired with devices using ultrasonic frequencies that could actually be heard by pets or people with good hearing.

Not only is the mode apparently disabled, but the the option to turn it on has disappeared from Home and Nest speaker device settings, as have the support pages for it. The instructions to make it work are still available on a cached page, however.

The feature is still available on Chromecast devices, so it’ll still be easy to hook up that friend with the Netflix account. It’s not clear why Google disabled it for Google Home, however, or exactly when the feature was disabled.

Understandably, everyone is doing their introspection right now; their year- and decade-end summaries of what was most dreadful in tech, and what lead to this mess we’re all in. I can assure you that one of the key factors is what we have come to call The Internet of Shit and how we’ve embraced it.

This was the decade technology broke us. The products saturating our lives are released in the worst, most broken, untested, and often dangerously flawed forms imaginable. Think Skynet, but a dumbass. Terminator, controlled by Shitnet. We’ve seen the films, we know the dystopian warnings. It enslaved us as a species anyway. We cannot escape. Because Siri can’t understand our pleas to unlock the door, the getaway vehicle won’t start until it reboots, you can’t even run away because your shoes are bricked from a bad update.

my friend’s 2 y/o thinks Alexa is omnipresent — she asks it to change the song or turn off the music even when they’re out at a restaurant. and now i’m wondering if smart speakers have totally killed off imaginary friends bc why dream one up if Alexa or Siri literally talk back

— 🅐🅩🅛 (@aaronzlewis) November 27, 2019

Just five years ago, Amazon told people it would be really cool if they could kindly put microphones in their homes with its release of the Echo (Alexa, 2014). This was after Samsung fired the starting gun to stick chips in everything with its SmartThings platform (2012). Google and Apple had already tricked us into carrying and depending upon their tracking and surveillance devices perversely called “smartphones.” So naturally, both companies joined the connected home data collection gold rush with Google Home (2016) and Apple HomePod (2018).

Of course, each has its own standards and none will work with each other (yet). Some won’t even work with themselves.

Anyway, the gold rush to stick a chip in everything and put spyware in people’s homes coincided with a lot of things, but namely increased awareness around surveillance, digital privacy, hacking, security, and the looming threat of a data-harvesting-advertising IoT apocalypse. A lot of people wondered how secure and private all these smart things were. Turns out, not at all! “The problems researchers identified were the kinds of things we in the security industry were writing about 10 or 15 years ago,” app security company Veracode cautioned in 2013. “A lack of basic authentication requirements to access administrative interfaces, open ports that leave the devices discoverable to internet scans, no privilege separation for user accounts and hard-coded passwords.”

who is he pic.twitter.com/9o7zMuR5SR

— Internet of Shit (@internetofshit) December 22, 2019

Like a drunk, dementia-addled billionaire bull in a china shop, each of the major players unfailingly rushed every dumb smart thing into our lives, consequences be damned.

They spied on us. This April, news came out that Amazon Alexa is “trained” by humans who listen to audio from users’ homes and offices without their knowledge. No one knew this — nor did users realize that all the home assistants do this. The story continued this month in “Silicon Valley Is Listening to Your Most Intimate Moments” — one reporter working on the story commented that “The contractors listening to voices were all horrified, and saw an obvious violation,” while “the companies were all surprised by the discomfort.”

They tricked us. In February, users found out the hard way that Google slipped a microphone into its Nest Guard product. The company told press it “forgot” to tell people who bought the device and installed it in their homes. Can you imagine being one of the most powerful companies in the world with elite-educated staff, and forgetting something this serious? Nope, I can’t either. Who do they think they are, Facebook? Well, woe to those who put a Nest Guard in their bedrooms thinking it was safe for truly private “no microphone” spaces.

They sold us broken things. It took The New York Attorney General’s office filing suit in 2017 to force smart lock maker Safetech to secure their locks by adding encryption, among other startlingly basic things. In August this year, June smart ovens were discovered to be preheating to over 400 degrees, sometimes overnight and with food inside them. Users were told it would be months before a fix. “Like all things with software in them,” we warned in 2015, “a dev somewhere probably meant to send it for a code audit, or eliminate the hard-coded password, or file a patch, or tell comms that customers urgently need to update the firmware on their smart toilet. But ultimately they were distracted by the chance to eat a dozen tacos for $2.” Hopefully no one’s home burns down in the meantime.

They took our data without consent. In 2017, Vizio settled charges admitting it put spyware on 11 million of its smart TVs to track people’s viewing histories and sell the data to advertisers. LG had been caught doing the same thing in 2013, and in 2015 Samsung pinky-sweared that its smart TV’s were not listening to you through its microphones. Regardless, this month the FBI issued a public warning about TV’s spying on us, urging people to use caution.

They forced ads and DRM down our throats. Last month, developer Wes Bos was extremely annoyed that he had to opt out of an intrusive advertisement for McDonald’s via the operating system of a TV he paid over a thousand dollars for. Keurig angered everyone in 2015 when its smart coffee machines came with software that blocks the use of older Keurig pods and pods made by competitors. (People are still finding ways to get around the DRM’d machines.)

Worst of all, they blamed us for what they had done. It’s difficult to know where to begin with Amazon’s Ring doorbell and camera system, whose problems are so voluminous and cringey we have to breathe into a paper bag every time we even think about it. The Ring product’s close relationship with law enforcement is messy and scary, including the use of facial recognition and the pile of data exposed by vulns in its Neighbors app.

Meanwhile, Ring (like Nest) is susceptible to credential-stuffing attacks, where hackers use black market tools to scrape usernames and passwords exposed in breaches and try them on new accounts, taking over if you re-used a compromised password. That’s where the recent spate of in-home camera attacks came from, and now Amazon/Ring face a lawsuit over these hacks. (Oh, also: until recently, Ring’s app was sending user credentials unencrypted.)

Ring’s response has been to blame us. It published a blame-the-user blog post earlier this month, following a November set of congressional questions in which Ring said it was users’ fault if a Ring camera violates their privacy.

And you know what? It’s easy to believe Big Tech when they say it’s all our fault, despite being obvious bullshit. In our cursed timeline where everything feels like a practical-effects, 1980s cyberpunk TV show, we chose to add these demonic toys into our lives. Do you even know your best friend’s phone number? How crippled would your apartment be without WiFi? They rushed their products to market — yet we rushed to bring them home.

If Big Tech’s framing of the situation feels wrong, that’s because it is. We wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for the broken and codependent relationship between Big Tech and its enablers — not to mention that our situation of constant, invasive surveillance via products with half-assed security is absolutely, 100 percent by design.

The failings here are not ours. It is not our fault if everything the companies do to us is the same; nonconsensual, lazy, ignorant of history and blind to abuses, flagrant in their disregard and obvious in their pretenses. “We take your privacy and/or security seriously” is the purest fiction this era of tech has produced.

Perhaps we can’t avoid the monsters these bloodsuckers created, but that does not mean we should ever stop fighting them.

Images: Daniel Cooper / Engadget (Ring doorbell video)

“Hulu subscribers can now ask their Google Assistant to play thousands of hit TV shows and movies from their basic subscription catalog on their Chromecasts, Chromecast built-in devices, and smart displays like Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max,” a spokesperson for Google told Android Police.

You can can link Assistant with Hulu by launching the Google Home app on your phone Tap the “Settings” cog icon toward the top of the interface, scroll down until you find the “Google Assistant services” section, and then tap on “TV & video” menu item. Confusingly, the title at the top of the window that opens up will say you’re in the “Videos and Photos” section. Inconsistent UI design aside, you’re in the right place. At this point, tap on the Hulu icon and input your login information when promoted. Just keep in mind that Google is currently rolling out this functionality, so you may not have the ability to add Hulu right away.

In case you didn’t know about Assistant’s ability to integrate with video streaming services, you can use this opportunity to link it with some of the other services you subscribe to. Some of the other platforms that support Assistant voice control include Netflix, CBS All Access and HBO Now.