Google Clips - google pixel review - Wireless Smart Camera. Pixel, Phone by Google. We take a closer look at the latest rumors about Google's upcoming Pixel 2 series. Details on specs, price, release date and more. Learn all about the Google Pixel. Full specs, great pricing and more.
Google has announced Google Clips, a new miniature camera that costs $249. Google Clips - Wireless Smart Camera. Google Clips is smart enough to recognize great expressions, lighting and framing and capture beautiful, spontaneous images.Phone by Google. The best phone on the planet, period. A high IQ and a world of potential. Pixel - The First Phone by Google.
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Google pixel review. Pixel and Pixel XL bring the power of Google to your fingertips.The Google Pixel was up there with the best phones of 2017, and it's still one of the finest out there today. The new Google Clips camera decides for itself when to take videos, and can recognise people.
Google Pixel 2: Release Date, Price, Specs, and Price Rumors
The Google Clips camera puts AI behind the lens
You know what a digital camera is. It's a lens and a sensor, with a display to see what you're looking at, and a button to take the picture. Google Clips is a camera, but it only has some of those parts. There's no display. There’s a shutter button, but it's completely optional to use. Instead, it takes pictures for you, using machine learning to recognize and learn faces and look for interesting moments to record.
It took me a while to wrap my head around Google Clips. It didn't land for me until Eva Snee, the user experience lead for the camera, told me a story about a little moving photo I was looking at. To me, it was just a couple of toddlers. To Snee, it was something very different.
I don't know if parents — Google's target market — will want it. I don't know if Google can find a way to explain everything it is (and isn't) to a broad enough audience to sell the thing in big numbers, especially at $249. I also don’t know what the release date will be, beyond that it will be “coming soon.”
But I do know that it's the most fascinating camera I've used in a very long time.
As for tech specs, they're sort of besides the point on a device like this, but here you go: it has a 12-megapixel sensor underneath a 130-degree field of view lens. It's capable of taking 15 fps bursts of images (and, again, that's the only thing it takes). It has 16GB of storage, which doesn't seem like much, but it was able to store two full days of clips it had recorded when I used it. Standby time should last on the order of "days." And again, there is no microphone.
It transfers everything over Wi-Fi direct, which works pretty seamlessly if you're using an Android phone; it requires you to select the camera's hot spot manually if you're using an iPhone. I've seen images transfer over to the app quickly, and I've seen it happen really slowly — all on preproduction software. Hopefully the final shipping software will be more like the former.
To start, it will only pair with Pixels, iPhones, and the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S8. Google says support for more phones will come over time.
The camera produces images and clips that look pretty good, though not quite as good as what you can get from your phone's camera. For one thing, the angle is wider, and for another, they're less likely to be perfectly framed because you usually aren't looking through the live preview viewfinder to line up your shot.
But the clips are nevertheless compelling, even though most of what I got were pictures of people shooting video of the camera. But everybody who has been playing around with moving pictures over the last few years is right: they're more compelling than still photos, especially when they're of people you care about.
Google is explicitly marketing this camera to parents. That makes a lot of sense: instead of being a machine that takes the highest-quality photos, it's a machine that takes the photos they wouldn't have had a chance to take.
Ultimately, Clips is fascinating because it's so difficult to categorize. It's not a GoPro or an action cam. It's not a security camera. It's not as good as your phone at taking high-quality pictures. It doesn't have a viewfinder, and the shutter button is literally an afterthought. The AI is ultimately making most decisions for you.
It’s the first standalone camera I've seen that was designed around a fundamental truth: we look at photos on our phones, not prints or laptop screens. And phone screens do stuff that those other screens can't, like move and share.
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That makes Google Clips something genuinely new. And even though we are being inundated with tech on a daily basis now, it's usually derivative. Something new demands our attention.