Gadgetory

this camera is unlike any other camera you've ever used before it's made by Google and like everything Google makes these days it uses machine learning to do something pretty special you see this camera which Google calls clips by the way let's the computer decide when to hit the shutter button you just turn it on point it at the world and the computer figures out of something interesting is happening and then it takes a picture of it now the craziest thing isn't that it works because you know of course it works Google's really good at making computers do fancy computer things No the craziest thing is that this camera which recognizes your face and your family's faces manages to do all that automatic recording without being the creepiest thing on planet earth and that's not just because it's so small and cute here's how it works like any phone accessory you turn it on and then you pair it to your phone and once it's paired you can just put your phone away if you want to you twist the lens on the clips to the on position and a little LED light starts blinking to let you know that it's on and it's looking for something to record the idea is that you're just gonna set it down or clip it to something and let it do its thing it looks for what Google's algorithms think might be interesting and then it records a little 7 second clip of that thing it might be of your kids playing or somebody's smiling just right or you know whatever the camera also learns over time it has facial recognition so it can recognize your face your family's faces and even your pets eventually it learns to take pictures of those people and ignore other people it's smart enough not to record your hand when you go to pick the thing up and it's smart enough to ignore really blurry shots because you're just swinging it around too fast but you know if you must you can hit the shutter button to take a picture manual like an animal so yes this all sounds very creepy like super creepy it sounds like a spy camera that learns your children's faces and records them automatically and sends them to Google kind of creepy Google says none of that is happening all of the data is stored only on this little camera fully encrypted and can only be transferred to the phone that you've paired it to and all of the face recognition and pet recognition and whatever only happens on the device to Google knows pretty darn well that you might be sqeezed out by a camera that recognizes your face and decides when to record it all by itself so it made this thing look really obviously like a camera it isn't meant to be hidden away and to be clear it does not have a microphone a blinking LED is the universal symbol for you might be being recorded so clips has one of those two it's also exclusively marketing this thing to parents and people with pets here's the pitch when you whip your phone out your adorable little monster might stop doing that really cute thing that it does the other thing that happens when you whip or phone out is that you're looking at the world through a screen and you're probably not gonna be in the picture yourself with clips google says that you do get to be in the picture and there's gonna be a bunch of candid moments that'll get captured for you automatically and the design is really smart too it's small and cute and teal but it's also square so that you can set it anywhere and it comes with this clip which you can you know clip the stuff now you can clip it to your shirt but Google says that a bunch of people have been testing that and that it kind of sucks so you really shouldn't think of this thing as a wearable camera it's also thin enough to drop in your pocket or your purse and when you do Clips is smart enough to realize hey I'm in a pocket and it will stop looking for something that I can take a picture of I have no idea if anybody's going to be convinced by all of that but if they are they're gonna get a pretty neat app to go with the camera it just creates a vertically scrolling list of all the clips that the camera has automatically recorded again they're stored on the camera they stream over to your phone over Wi-Fi you just scroll through them and swipe one direction to save the ones you want and swipe the other direction to delete the ones you don't the app can also be used to give you a live preview so if you're trying to set up a group shot with a whole mess of people you can preview it live in the app and when you hit the shutter button it records that same 7 seconds you can scrub through any clip and pick out just the frame you want to save and if you want you can even trim any of these longer clips to exactly the length that you want when you're done you can share it as a gif or video file or plain old image or in Google's new motion photos format the early prototype version of the app I tried was sometimes crazy fast and super fun to use and sometimes it was a little bit slow and annoying I'm really hoping the final version will be more like the fun version that I tried oh yeah it's a camera so here are the specs it has a hundred and thirty degree lens on a 12 megapixel camera that's not quite as good as what you'd get on a phone but it's still pretty nice it only has eight gigs of storage but that seems like it's enough to store a ton of these clips it was more than I could shoot in a single day it should last about three hours if you have it on and actively recording stuff and it should go for a few days on standby it weighs 42 grams and again there is no microphone at all remember it's not creepy Google says it works with pixel phones iPhones and the Samsung Galaxy s7 and essayed but that more phone support should be coming soon maybe the most important spec is the price 249 bucks to me that feels like it's at least 50 bucks too expensive but then again I don't have kids to Google it thinks that all the personal sweet in-between moments that this thing can capture is going to justify the price I guess we'll see who's right when it goes on sale very soon so that's clips but use this thing for well like I said before Google says it's for parents and pet parents because pet parenting is definitely a thing and you know what that's true you're gonna be able to get pictures with this little thing that you wouldn't have gotten before because you know the camera would have kept you from doing it this just does it automatically but for me what's really interesting about this is that it's a new kind of camera I mean let's face it how do you look at pictures you look at them on your phone and your phone is capable of doing really interesting things because it has a screen and a processor and all the stuff and not a lot of cameras are taking advantage of that new way of looking at pictures by making them move and loop and turn the gifts of the whole shebang and this camera does that it's not a GoPro it's not an action cam it's not a spy camera or security camera it's something I think genuinely new it's you know it's an adorable little glimpse at the future photography