At today's hardware event, Google has announced a surprise new product: Clips. It's a little standalone camera that changes how pictures are taken. The Clips device itself figures out when something exciting is happening—happy faces, good lighting, interesting framing—and, when it thinks the time is right, it records (silent) video captures.

This transforms photography from something with an actively involved photographer into something passive that should help capture spontaneous, natural events. If you don't trust the software and want to guarantee that a particular picture is taken, Clips has a manual capture button, too. And high-resolution stills can be taken from the videos.

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

The Clips is described as being able to learn—it'll figure out which faces and pets you see regularly and know that you'll probably want to capture them more often. But, with a nod to privacy, Google says that Clips can still do its thing while offline and not connected to Wi-Fi.

As long as your phone has Wi-Fi Direct or Bluetooth, you can use it to sort through Clips' pictures and decide what to keep. Those phones are currently oddly limited; Google says it needs a device running Android 7.0 or better, but the company specifically lists only the Pixel, Samsung Galaxy S7, and Samsung Galaxy S8 as being compatible. A larger list of compatible handsets is presently unavailable.

The camera has a wide, 130-degree field of view, records video at 15fps, and has 16GB of internal storage. It will last for three hours on a single charge.

The device will cost $249 and will be available "soon."