There’s a new market emerging for cheap, YouTube-quality digital video recorders that are easy to use. That’s where this product comes in.

The Flip MinoHD is the successor to the Flip Mino, a standard-definition digital camcorder that recorded to it’s own internal memory and had a no-frills interface, making it easy for novice computer users (and novice directors) to take videos. The Flip MinoHD pretty much stays in that same vein but has some nice bonuses for the price it retails at ($229 retail, $207 on amazon.com at the time of this writing).

First Impressions

The MinoHD’s retail box immediately reminded me of an Apple product box; very sleek, refined packaging. The unit I received was gloss black. I was impressed by how little space the device takes up. It’s extremely small and light, and other than the springy USB trigger, has no moving parts.

Specs

The MinoHD differs from the earlier Mino models in that now it records video files in 1280×720 (referred to as 720p in the HD world). It uses the popular H.264 MPEG 4 codec to store video, which allows you to store approximately 60 minutes of video in it’s 4GB of fixed internal memory.

The device has a fixed lens that offers “digital zoom” (digital cropping, not an actual zoom). I’ve used hand-held recorders with optical zoom in the past such as the Sanyo Xacti HD series of digital camcorders. I really liked having that feature on those models, but this recorder is much cheaper than the best Sanyo Xacti model I’ve used, which is the Sanyo Xacti HD1010.

The device weighs only 3.3 oz, easily fits in a shirt or jacket pocket, and has a USB interface that flips out from within the device to make it easy to plug into any USB port and start importing your video files.

The rear of the MinoHD has a few touch-sensitive buttons for deletion and playback of videos, a physical (non-touch sensitive) record button, and a very small, non-widescreen 1.5″ LCD. I was kind of disappointed in the LCD not being at least widescreen format, since the videos it takes are widescreen format themselves. Maybe this will be in the next incarnation.

Video Quality / Recording Video

The MinoHD’s video quality is variable depending on the level of light and how stable the camera is. I’ve found the MinoHD works best in good light (outdoors) and standing still while panning around and recording. Video taken this way looks pretty darn good. However, there’s no image stabilization to be found in this camera, which makes it really jarring to watch some clips that are recorded if you’re moving while filming.

The low-light performance was adequate, but washed out a lot of the picture and was noisy. I wouldn’t expect amazing low-light performance from a video camera this cheap, but it still is a bit annoying. The camera does have a standard tripod mount on the bottom for more stable recording.

The audio recording is also nothing amazing, but it works. The camera captures a lot of high frequencies, and the sound seems like it lacks depth. I’m not really hung up on this feature myself, though. There is not a separate place to plug in a microphone on the device, so you’re stuck with this mic if you decide to use this camera.

As stated earlier, it records video to 1280×720 H.264 MP4 files, which can be played in Apple’s QuickTime Player, VLC, or the bundled application with the camera. They are immediately compatible with YouTube or Vimeo without any software tweaking.

I tried taking a few short videos (under a minute) and uploading them to YouTube straight from the camera itself. The process is simple, I uploaded straight from the device to YouTube like it was a USB thumb drive. You can also use Flip’s built in software on the device (which works on both PC and Mac) to edit or manage your video files before uploading.

General Impressions / Final Thoughts

If I had to give a recommended buyer for this camera, It’d be a person who doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on gadgets, and who wants to take high-definition video on the go in a very portable way. I can see why this unit’s predecessor sold so well.

The MinoHD has the same feature set as a disposable camera (cheap, fixed-focus lens, very little control) in an easy to use form factor. It’s affordable, especially when compared to other digital video recorders in the market today.

For the price, I’d say to definitely give it a try if something like this sounds useful to you. You can even customize it with any graphic/color combination you wish when it’s ordered through the Flip website, which I found kind of neat.

If I had to give my own point of view on how I use the MinoHD, I find it to be a bit limiting – and for a few hundred dollars more (the price of say, a Sanyo Xacti HD1010, you can get much more flexibility, better overall video quality, and some level of image stabilization. But I’m probably not the target market for this product. Or am I?

I knew this was going to happen. Research In Motion (the makers of the BlackBerry series of smart phones) finally made a product that didn’t live up to my expectations.

I’ll tell you more in detail below, but first a bit of history: At my 9-to-5 job it is one of my roles to manage a BlackBerry server and 50-odd BlackBerry phones, so I’ve used every model of BlackBerry available in the US for the most part in some capacity or another.

Currently, I have a Verizon BlackBerry Curve at the office. My current home cell phone is an iPhone 3G. I asked our corporate Verizon representative to send me a demo of the Storm, because I’ve had a lot of BlackBerry users at work asking me when we were getting them (due to the media saturation of the commercials and the general coolness factor of how the phone looks). So I felt it was my duty to get one in for review so I could make an educated decision about recommending this thing to upper management and other people who may be interested in it.

A lot has been said about this phone in reviews by other technology journalists on the web (David Pogue of the New York Times for instance, and Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal), some positive, some negative. I used the phone for a solid 4 days of testing and one software upgrade (to try to fix an issue, more later on that) before deciding to write this.

I’ll go over some key items about the phone in a few sections, the stuff that’s important to me as a consumer. Things that have been in BlackBerry OS forever (such as push email, calendar sync, etc) are really not that noteworthy to me, and I won’t talk much about those. I can, and will compare this phone to the iPhone 3G though, simply because RIM was definitely aiming right at Apple when designing this, I have no doubts about that.

Phone Design

The BlackBerry Storm is a slick looking phone — which elicits the expected reaction from nearly everyone you show it to. It is very heavy feeling, about the same weight as the iPhone 3G. I would say it feels solid, but then you press down on the touchscreen itself (since it is one large button), and it wobbles and leaks light in from behind the screen. It is not the most comfortable phone to hold, but then again I don’t think the iPhone wins in that category, either. Both of them could benefit from the rubberized grip of the BlackBerry Curve (or other phones that actually seem like they’re designed to be held).

Underneath the black aluminum battery cover (yes, unlike the iPhone the battery can be removed – score 1 for RIM), there is a removable 8GB MicroSDHC card, which is a great thing for them to provide. The last generation of BlackBerry phones (The Curve and Pearl) include a MicroSD card slot, but they didn’t give you a card with the phones. 8GB is more than enough for a decent amount of media and pictures. It also included a Verizon SIM card (which I think is a placeholder, since Verizon doesn’t sell GSM phone service). I’ve been told that this can be unlocked just as easily as other BlackBerry phones so you can roam the world with it easily (this is another thing the iPhone 3G requires hacking to do.)

RIM abandoned the standard Mini USB port they’ve used for several years for a new “Micro” USB port for charging and connecting the phone to the computer. This means all your old BlackBerry chargers and any wired peripherals won’t work with the new phone. This is kind of a letdown for me as a BlackBerry administrator, simply because we have dozens of perfectly good spare BlackBerry car and home chargers that are now useless if we move to the Storm.

The Screen

The screen is one of the better things this phone has to offer. It has a 3.25″, 480×360 pixel screen, with very easy to read text and a very bright backlight, with a nice glossy sheen to it. I really have no gripes whatsoever with the actual screen in this phone by itself, if I don’t take into account the way or manner information is displayed on it or it’s “click” function. It is better than the iPhone’s screen in both clarity, size, and general readability.

The Accelerometer

This is the first BlackBerry with an accelerometer in the device. Again, another thing I believe RIM decided to copy from the iPhone (even though the iPhone is not the first device to use something like this, it’s the first one to do it right in my opinion.) I found the sensor had major lag issues (even after a software update to the 4.7.0.75 leaked firmware!) with moving from portrait to landscape. Sometimes it took up to 4 seconds for the phone to change back from landscape to portrait with nothing else going on. This is simply unacceptable. It would inadvertently switch screen orientation at random times when it wasn’t necessary to do so, and it confused all the users I gave the phone to. The final straw with the accelerometer is for some reason RIM believes that if you have your phone locked, it should still change orientation from portrait to landscape. I honestly can’t figure out why I’d want my phone sitting there in my pocket switching orientation when it’s locked and not being used. I hope they fix this in a software update.

The Keyboard

The screen being covered in its literal sense, I’ll discuss the biggest part of what makes the Storm the Storm: The keyboard and its role in the UI. RIM decided in the BlackBerry Storm’s development to eschew the traditional BlackBerry keyboard for two different “touch” keyboards. These both are familiar to older users of BlackBerry phones: The “SureType” style in the 7100 series and Pearl (2 letters per key), active while in Portrait orientation, or the QWERTY style (full keyboard), like in the Curve, 8700, and 8800 series, which is active in landscape orientation.

However, the old keyboard layouts work completely differently in the Storm — because they are now part of the touch screen and are activated by “clicking” in the entire screen while your finger is over the corresponding button. The screen acts as one giant button that you press in with every letter press, icon click, or menu selection.

I’ve found typing for any period of time becomes tiresome after only a minute or so, and it seems like way too much work even to just send off a small text message. The auto-correction software (SureType) seems like it isn’t as effective as it was in the BlackBerry Curve, and sometimes the phone simply types letters that I didn’t press, even though it looks like I’m pressing the right one due to the blue “halo” around my finger as I hover over the letters.

The keyboard isn’t completely missing. There are still 4 physical buttons on the front of the phone, which include the typical SEND and END keys, the “Menu” key, and the “Back” key, both of those last two are holdovers from previous BlackBerry incarnations. I’m kind of surprised they couldn’t find some way to integrate these into the touch screen.

If this review was trying to convince me to buy this phone, this keyboard would be the deal breaker. I can’t stand it. People who might peck one or two characters every 5 seconds might not care about how bad this is, but for me, it was infuriating to use it. I can type on my BlackBerry Curve at approximately 30 words a minute. The iPhone 3G? maybe 20-25. This was much, much less than that. I’m extremely disappointed; one of the huge advantages of BlackBerry was their highly efficient keyboard and the “Pearl” (or scroll wheel in the older generations), and that speed and fluidity is completely obliterated with a keyboard UI that just doesn’t work. I had several non-techie users at my office try to type on it who were BlackBerry users, and they either typed incredibly slow or were just confused by the new keyboard.

The Touch Screen, And It’s Role In The User Interface

In general, the touch screen functions are a good effort for a phone if you ignore one thing: the existence of iPhone. Apple clearly invested much, much more time into usability and interface design here than RIM did. A few things about the iPhone that you don’t notice you miss until you use the Storm are the ability to quickly “flick” through lists of items, multi-touch capabilities like pinch gesturing, double-tapping to zoom smoothly into/out of web pages, and smooth scrolling through websites. All of these things are not something the Storm does well (or at all in some cases), and I’m sure I’m missing a lot more here. Maybe its related to patent issues, but the touch screen in the Storm just seems dumber than the iPhone touch screen. That’s about all I can say about it.

Research In Motion has not paid enough attention to the menu UI in regards to making it easy for people to “click” on menu items, either. They are too small for even my (not that large) fingers to consistently press in properly. Making calls from the old UI was simple: Start dialing from the home screen. Now you have to press the SEND button to get to the call area, or click on the call log, which wasn’t immediately apparent to any veteran BlackBerry user I showed it to.

The Apps

As of right now, there’s really little that is new or interesting about the applications bundled with the Storm. VZ Navigator is included, which is a turn-by-turn GPS application that has a lot of good Points of Interest and other neat features. Unfortunately Verizon charges $10/mo for this feature, which is really not worth paying a monthly fee for. There’s not a good turn-by-turn GPS on the iPhone right now, but if it cost $10/mo extra, I wouldn’t buy it anyway.

Refinements to BlackBerry OS 4.7 to make it look very pretty are great, but those were done in OS 4.6 already for the BlackBerry Bold (a far superior phone for people who might actually want to type out an email!). BlackBerry even created some sort of half-baked version of Apple’s App Store, but it simply forwards you to web pages to download applications. Not even close, RIM.

The development happening for iPhone right now is astounding. I’d be surprised if the Storm gets this level of interest, considering there’s already a huge glut of years worth of BlackBerry applications that still work on the Storm. There are a lot of great BlackBerry apps (A shining example is BeeJiveIM, which is also on iPhone), so it’s not all bad but it really doesn’t compare to some of the great stuff on the iPhone right now.

On a positive note, applications on the Storm (or any other BlackBerry) can run in the background, which is one thing about the iPhone that is a frustrating design choice apple made that they play off as a feature to save battery life.

The Web Browser

One of the biggest changes in the 4.7 BlackBerry OS for the Storm is the web browser. The web browser definitely benefits from the much higher screen resolution on this phone, and actually renders real pages in a very readable way. Verizon’s network is extremely fast (but not WiFi fast). The browser simply isn’t up to the level of Mobile Safari on the iPhone/iPod Touch, though. The gestures that are in the iPhone for web browsing are light-years ahead in terms of ease of use than in the BlackBerry browser. This version is a marked improvement over the BlackBerry OS 4.5 browser, though.

The Network

As the commercials state, Verizon’s data network is the fastest out there. Their voice coverage is arguably the best in the nation. The phone does not have Wi-Fi, though, which comes in handy when you’re somewhere that doesn’t have Verizon’s extremely fast Rev. A EVDO. This is the first BlackBerry on Verizon that supports tethering for internet on Rev. A EVDO, the prior ones only supported Rev. 0 (the slower EVDO speed).

Generally speaking, sites and downloads came through very quickly in my tests in my metro area. The phone supports both CDMA (Verizon) network, and GSM networks with a SIM (worldwide with an unlock which is something very easy to do on the BlackBerry and not something you can do on the iPhone without hacks.) This is one of the major advantages of having this phone on Verizon, their network is great. You pay for it, though.

Camera

It’s not all bad news. The camera is 3.2 megapixels, with an auto-focus feature. At this point this is the best camera I have ever used in a cell phone. As a disclaimer I must mention I haven’t used the Nokia N95, which has a 5 megapixel camera in it, or the new N97. The auto-focus feature is main reason I like this camera. Being able to focus on close items (e.g. a piece of paper) and still have the text on the page be sharp is a huge bonus; this is something you simply can’t do with the iPhone 3G’s camera. The camera’s lag time for the shutter and taking photos is brutally slow, especially in low light. The iPhone 3G’s camera has similar issues, though.

Battery Life

The battery life on the Storm seemed to be pretty decent; I don’t have any scientific estimates on how long it lasts under light or heavy use. One of my gripes with the iPhone 3G is you can easily drain the battery to nearly nothing within 3 hours if you use it heavily. I didn’t have anything worth using heavily on my Storm to really drain it, so I’m not a totally fair judge of this, but it seemed that the Storm’s battery life is quite decent, and probably better than the iPhone 3G for general use.

Additionally, having a removable battery is a very nice feature… albeit one I don’t really care much about, since I generally have some type of charger near me, whether it’s in a car, my desk at work, or an outlet at home.

General Impressions / In Closing

So, you’re wondering after reading this, do I recommend the BlackBerry Storm to anyone?

My short answer: No.

My longer answer: The phone isn’t refined enough. It lags doing simple things like orienting the screen and scrolling through the icons (even after their first firmware update), and needs more attention paid to the UI.

For consumers on Verizon who won’t leave (either due to loyalty or the other carriers not having good signal in your area), or corporate customers on Verizon: I’d say to either get a BlackBerry Pearl or Curve, or better yet, wait for Verizon to get the BlackBerry Bold (probably sometime in 2009). You don’t want this touch screen. Skip it. I haven’t personally reviewed the Bold yet, but it seems like it’s inherited all the best UI features from the Storm and a great input interface to use them with.

For consumers who want a cool phone right now and don’t care about what carrier it’s on: Get the iPhone 3G. Right now, overall, it is truly the best smart phone for the largest swath of consumers out there. Its flaws are overcome by an amazing development scene and a very well done user interface.

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Additional media: A short video I made documenting the lag in both the accelerometer interface and scrolling through the main screen’s icons.