The Google Home Hub Is the Perfect Mother’s Day Gift

Google

When it comes to Mother’s Day gifts things can be a bit hit or miss, but pictures of kids and grandkids are always a slam dunk hit. The Google Home Hub, with its beautiful picture mode and ease of use, is a perfect gift for mom.

A quick note before we dive in: Yesterday announced the Google Home team is merging with Nest and the Google Home Hub is now known as the Google Nest Hub—we don’t make the name changes, we just report them. Nobody but Google itself has updated their storefronts to reflect the name change yet, however, so for the purposes of this guide (helping you get a good Mother’s Day gift before this Sunday) we’ve stuck with the old name. If you happen to see the “Nest Hub” you’re looking at the same product, though. Back to our “Buy a Hub for mom!” argument.

The start of our search for the perfect Mother’s Day gift was driven by a few ideas we’d picked up over years of Mother’s Day gifting. First, almost all moms love photos—photos of their kids, photos of their grandkids, even photos of their grandpets. It’s almost impossible to go wrong with photos as a gift.

Second, almost all digital picture frames are pretty cruddy and suffer from a host of interface and usability issues. Many of us on staff had given digital picture frames as Mother’s Day (or birthday or Christmas) gifts to our moms over the years but inevitably found them lacking.

RELATED: Product Of The Year: The Google Home Hub

Either they didn’t have a cloud-based service and we were stuck updating them with SD cards (which, spoiler alert, never happened) or if they did have a cloud-based service it was just inconvenient to use or we forgot all about it.

Third, and not directly related to digital picture frames but related to Mother’s Day gifts in general, many Mother’s Day gifts are of fairly limited utility. There’s nothing wrong with getting your mom flowers or a book she wants, but a bouquet is not exactly a gift that keeps on giving. Call us overly pragmatic, but we like giving useful gifts.

The Google Home Hub was our 2018 Product of the Year pick for a pile of good reasons and many of those reasons directly overlap with the issues we just outlined. Here’s why we think a Home Hub is the perfect Mother’s Day gift.

The Picture Frame Mode Is Fantastic Looking

First and foremost, the Google Home Hub is an absolutely amazing digital picture fame. We keep every single Home Hub in our home and office and the slideshow mode because it’s just so damn good at it.