You’d be forgiven for thinking that Nest, the company that so wonderfully disrupted the home thermostat market back in 2011, has been in a moribund state the past couple of years. Its mobile apps haven’t changed, its product lineup has stagnated, and its most notable news of 2016 was the exit of co-founder and CEO Tony Fadell. But today the Alphabet-owned company is making a splashy return to prominence with a new "intelligent" indoor camera called the Nest Cam IQ. Bearing a similar shape and styling to Nest’s signature thermostat, the Cam IQ costs $299 (or $498 for a pair) and will begin shipping by the end of June.

I got to see it behind closed doors during this month’s Google I/O conference, where Nest’s director of product marketing Maxime Veron walked me through the new camera’s capabilities and hinted at a busy summer ahead for the company. The aim with the Cam IQ, Veron says, is nothing short of being the "best in class security camera." That starts with a focus on video quality, which is well supported with a 4K HDR image sensor, powered by a hexa-core Qualcomm CPU. The video it outputs will still be limited to 1080p, mind you, but the expanded resolution will help with zooming in on particular areas without a loss in fidelity. There’s also a night vision mode provided by two infrared LEDs, which Veron proudly notes operate at a 940nm wavelength, making them almost invisible to the human eye.

Nest has also built in a powerful speaker, a three-microphone array with noise and echo suppression, and an impressively flexible and strong pivot stand, but the hardware is really not the thing this company’s excited about. Matt Rogers, Nest’s other co-founder, is quoted in today’s press release: "When designing Nest Cam IQ, we focused on what we’ve learned from our customers, which is that people don’t want more information, they want insights." Nest’s Cam IQ sales pitch is more about the IQ than the cam, which at the most superficial level will be manifested by its future integration with both Google Home and Amazon Alexa (though, no, it can’t function as a standalone Google Home or Amazon Echo speaker).

Using some deep-learning tech from Google, the Cam IQ can accurately detect what’s moving within its field of vision — whether it’s just your pet, for instance, or a shadow cast by the changing light. If it’s something more sinister, like a person, the camera can then automatically zoom in and track that person as they move around the room. Should you opt to subscribe to the Nest Aware service ($10 per month or $100 per year), the Cam IQ will also offer a facial recognition facility that will sort between known friends or family members and any strangers, and alert you accordingly. Additionally, making use of those extra mics, Nest Aware can now also pick up audio cues for alarm, whether it be a dog barking, humans talking, or a window being smashed.

The video Nest showed me from the Cam IQ was indeed crisp and sharp and it provided much better definition of a fake burglar’s bearded face than the footage captured by an anonymous leading competitor. That’s a stage-managed demo designed to emphasize Nest’s advantage, to be sure, but I was still left with a very positive impression of the image quality obtained from what’s typically been a quite drab and unexciting category of hardware. I half-think some people could use this camera as a fallback vlogging tool. And let’s not forget about the hardware quality of this thing: it’s beautifully built, the stand articulates in every direction with a smooth, perfectly measured resistance, and there’s a USB-C power port on the back, Bluetooth LE within, and a standard tripod mount at the bottom.

With end-to-end encryption and person alerts that send you automatically zoomed in and cropped portraits of anyone detected, the Cam IQ promises to provide the security and insight that Rogers talks about. I was disappointed to find very little in the way of synergy between Nest’s prior home security cams and this one — they are, essentially, discrete products that don’t relate to one another — but Veron tells me Nest’s relative silence in recent times is about to be a thing of the past. "I am very excited about the next six months," he says with a grin, "we’ll talk again soon and you’ll understand why." If reports from earlier this month are to be believed, the next item on Nest’s agenda is likely to be a cheaper thermostat.

The Nest Cam IQ is available to preorder now in the United States, and will soon also be up for preorder in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Ireland for €349, as well as the UK for £299 (that price is not a typo, feel free to blame Brexit). Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain will join the preoder ranks on June 13th, and the first Cam IQs should begin shipping by the end of the month.