ATLANTA — The new flagship of the popular Flip video recorder series adds lots of style while making it even easier to get clips online.
The sleek new Mino ($179 retail) also has shrunk in size – it's smaller than a pack of cards and nestles nicely in even the tiniest purse. Expanded features include improved video and audio quality, a rechargeable battery, touch-sensitive buttons and the capability to quickly publish content to popular sites such as MySpace and YouTube.
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The battery holds a four-hour charge and the 2 gigabytes of internal memory can shoot up to 60 minutes of 9-inch wide video (640 x 480) in the ubiquitous "avi" file format.
Pros
It looks great. And it's available in black or white.
Eminently portable.
New built-in software fires up quickly and makes it easy to view and edit videos or capture snapshots on a Mac or PC.
Touch-sensitive buttons light up, so it's easy to see which options are currently available.
The USB jack flips out of the top of the camera like a switchblade.
Good results in low-light situations.
Cons
New buttons are less tactile, and take getting used to. Large hands may not approve.
Video quality, while improved, is not as good as a full-fledged video camera.
No USB cord is included. Simply plugging the camera into a laptop USB port can be unwieldy.
George Mathis writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: gmathis AT ajc.com
