Gadgetory

this is the Google clips it's a 250 dollar smart camera that uses AI to detect and capture important moments in your life now if you're a parent or pet owner you're probably familiar with the frustration of trying to capture great candids of your kids or pets activities or maybe you're familiar with having a ton of photos and video of your family members but you're not in any of them because you're always the one behind the camera now Google thinks clips can solve that frustration by providing a camera that can do all of the shooting for you the only problem is well the clips just doesn't really work that well at its core the clips is a simple automatic point-and-shoot camera that's similar looking to a GoPro but it's considerably smaller it has a fixed focus lens with a 130 degree wide angle field of view a single button and a few LEDs but no displaying your user interface of its own it connects to an iPhone Google pixel or Samsung Galaxy s7 or s8 through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi direct to download the images it captures and control it but inside is what supposedly makes the clip special it's running Google's People detection algorithms to recognize familiar faces and interesting activity and then capture those moments that you care about automatically but this is a big but the clips isn't recording video or sound it's technically shooting a bunch of still images at roughly 15 frames per second which it then stitches into seven second clips from which you can edit or pull stills Adam it's basically making high resolution gifts out of the sequences of images now you can use a big button on the front of the camera to force a capture or you can use the app on your phone to see what the camera is viewing and take shots there but the whole point of Clips is to let the camera and Google's algorithms do all of the heavy lifting so you can just enjoy your time and then look at the memories it captures later on now the facilitate this the clips comes with a silicone case that makes it easy to prop up almost anywhere or yes you can just clip it to things but it's not designed to be a body camera you're supposed to just set it down and leave it alone for the most part there are other accessories you can buy like this case that lets you mount the clips to a tripod for more positioning options but otherwise using the clips is as simple as turning it on and then putting it where you want it you can adjust the frequency of captures in the clips app and you can also train it with people that matter to you by linking it with your Google Photos account the clips can we're supposed to learn the faces of important people by who it's exposed to most often but by using the photos data it's supposed to speed things along you can also push the button on the front of the camera to take a direct portrait of someone that you want the clips to prioritize now Google takes all of that data and then tries to figure out whenever your kids are in the frame and doing something interesting or photogenic like say dancing or smiling and then automatically capturing your clip now pets work a little differently because Google's camera algorithms can't actually tell these individual dogs apart it basically just looks for any time it has an animal in the frame and then opens its shutter now Google stresses all of this is happening locally on the clips camera itself nothing is happening in the cloud and in fact the clips doesn't even have a way of connecting to the internet good now once the camera has captured a bunch of clips you use the app to browse through them on your phone you can edit them down to shorter versions grab still images out of them or just save the whole thing to your phone storage for sharing and editing later the clips app is supposed to learn based on which clips you save and deem important and then prioritize capturing similar clips in the future you can also hit a toggle to view suggested clips for saving which is basically what the app thinks you'll like out of the clips it has captured I've been testing the closest of my two kids for the better part of the past week and while I appreciate what Google's trying to do here I can't say that I'm terribly impressed or happy with the results I'm used to being the one to take the photos of my family whether they're candid or posed moments which means it's been very hard to trust that the clips camera is going to do what I normally do for example I found it wasn't taking shots all that often so I tweaked the settings in the app to increase its frequency but it still seems to be very conservative with what it will actually capture the Google says that the clips is supposed to let you not worry about taking photos and videos and just let you enjoy your time and your family but it also admits that putting the clips in one spot and leaving it there is an ideal either you really have to move it around and put it in different places and angles to get the best results frankly at that point I might as well just be using my now on top of that the clips camera hardware just isn't very good the images that captures a flat grainy and often have a lot of motion blur especially indoors where I'd use it the most the 15 frames per second animations don't really make for smooth video and I actually missed the sound from many of the clips at the end of the day there just really weren't any clips that I felt were better or more authentic than I could capture with my phone and in most cases the image quality was bad enough that I had just wish I used my phone to begin with now I'm sure I could get better at using this I could use some practice and get a better idea of its ultra wide-angle field of view find the best angles and positions it works for and so on but I'm not convinced that the effort involved here would be rewarded with really great results and that makes it tough to justify buying and using the clips camera beyond its cost there's also having to bring it along make sure it's charged and then go through transferring its images to my phone when I could just use the phone I already have and get better images and video to begin with Google is definitely onto something here and I hope it's eventually able to make it easier to capture pictures of light kids in the future right now the clips just isn't doing it oh my god