While the Nest Protect product remains unavailable, the Nest Learning Thermostat now goes on sale on Google Play Store for $249, which seems to be timely for the Earth Day celebration.
In fact, Nest made a pledge for every thermostat sold on the Earth Day through the Play Store.
"To help get things started, we're going to plant a tree for every Nest Thermostat sold today on the U.S. Nest Store and Google Play, the newest place to buy Nest," says Nest's Yoky Matsuoka in a blog post on April 22.
"In honor of Earth Day, we're excited to announce that we've crunched the numbers and come to a pretty amazing conclusion: for the majority of our customers, the Nest Thermostat can become carbon neutral in just eight weeks," she also says. "For some customers, it can take as little as two weeks."
From the time of order, Nest product will be shipped from the warehouse within one to two business days, with a two-year warranty. The product has a 320×320 pixel touch panel and dual-channel Wi-Fi. For those who don't know yet, Nest Thermostat is said to be energy-efficient, helping homeowners lower the cooling and heating bills by up to 20 percent. The product can be Internet-connected, which makes it accessible through the laptop, tablet or smartphone devices.
Prior to this final, official listing, it was reported earlier by Droid Life that it spotted the thermostat product at the Play Store but was quickly taken down.
"While no announcement or movement has happened thus far, we noticed today that on Google Play's support pages for available devices, they list Nest as being available on Google Play in the US, UK, and Canada. That is interesting for the simple fact that the device isn't actually available on Google Play in any of those countries," Droid Life reports on April 21.
What's interesting is, Droid Life discovered when it tried to click on the product link, it redirects to the page of the Moto G GPE, which left them wondering if someone screwed it up or the list was simply a premature move. With such reports, people were asking previously if the Nest devices will soon be available for purchase directly through the Play Store or not.
Though it shouldn't be much of a surprise if the sale really goes up there because Google now owns Nest, except that it wasn't similarly done with other Nest products such as the Nest Protect and other Motorola products, the Droid Life explains. The description of the earlier listing also enumerates in what regions the product is available or not available.
Other reports speculate that this could be Google's effort to make its presence felt in the living room thru smart home tech, following failed attempts for entertainment products such as the Google TV and streaming media player Nexus Q to fly in the market.
Google acquired nest Labs in January for $3.2 billion, but market watchers say they haven't seen any development on how the two companies can combine its products and services or if Google Play Store would be a venue to sell Nest devices. In spite of being acquired by Google, Nest is said to function somewhat as an independently run group inside the Google organization.
Now, that the Nest Learning Thermostat is officially up in business at the Google Play Store, we could say that the earlier listing was possibly a premature one or a technical glitch.
