The FCC has kindly outed Cisco’s latest device, the FlipShareTV, seemingly a companion media streamer for the company’s Flip range of point-and-shoot camcorders. The three-part FlipShareTV consists of a remote control, USB dongle for your computer, and a set-top box, with a basic folder-based browsing structure that can be used to view recorded video that has been transferred from the camcorders.
Flip popularized the tiny camcorder category with its Mino line of camcorders that were cheap and designed to be carried everywhere you go. The Flip line uploads directly to YouTube making them very popular with the video uploading crowd. We have reviewed the Flip Ultra camcorder before here at SlashGear. Flip has announced a new version of its camcorder called the MinoHD 120 that will ship on November 9 from the Flip website with 120 minutes of recording capacity.
Joby announced their Gorillamobile tripod today, which acts a shift of emphases on cameras with their GorillaPod to mobile devices like the iPhone or Flip camera.
What’s cool about this tripod is that it can be used on just about any surface because of its ball joint legs. They can even bend so as to attach your device to a bike, a light pole or what have you.
Included with the Gorillamobile tripod is a suction-cup mount and adhesive clips. You can get the tripod by the end of the summer for $29.95.
If you’ve considered Verizon’s FiOS internet service but dismissed it for being too slow for your tastes, the news that they’re speeding up the fiber-optic system will come as a pleasant surprise. The company is boosting downlink/uplink speeds of its entry-level package from 10/2 Mbps to 15/5 Mbps, while the mid-tier 20/5 Mbps climbs to 25/15 Mbps. New York City and Long Island will see even greater increases.
We kicked off the week with a review of Sony’s OLED Walkman X, coming away mighty impressed by its iPod-besting audio quality. Equally impressive was Flip Video’s Ultra HD pocket camcorder; if only we could say the same for SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone. While on paper this media-shifting app should be a 100-percent winner, AT&T’s decision to bar streaming over their 3G network has left us and many would-be users upset.
Flip Video carved a niche for themselves with point-and-shoot camcorders, and it’s a niche which soon got crowded as rival firms offered their own entry-level devices. The launch of the Mino HD late last year kicked things into 720p high-definition, while squeezing the camcorder down into a super-pocketable size; now the bigger Ultra model gets its own high-def upgrade, in the shape of the Flip Video Ultra HD. Is there still a place in the range for the chunkier Ultra HD? SlashGear set to finding out.
It comes as no great surprise, given they’re already on Best Buy shelves and we’ve seen a photo unboxing, but Flip Video have officially announced their new Flip Ultra and Flip UltraHD camcorders. Both boast 2hrs-worth of storage (2GB in the second-gen Ultra, 8GB in the new UltraHD) and have Flip’s distinctive pop-out USB plug and preloaded FlipShare editing and distribution app.
There may be no sign of the Flip Video Ultra HD on the company’s own site, but that hasn’t stopped Best Buy from selling the point-and-shoot camcorder. A high-definition update to the original Ultra, the Ultra HD adds an HDMI output and doubles recording time to 120 minutes.
Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder: that’s obviously why Cisco have announced plans to buy Pure Digital – the company behind the much-esteemed Flip Video camcorders – for a huge $590m in stock. The announcements comes after recent rumors of a half-billion deal that many dismissed as far-fetched given the current economic climate.
It’s been a mobile device bonanza this week, with the AT&T Fuze landing at SlashGear and promptly getting hauled over to the Sprint HTC Touch Pro for a damned good comparing. Meanwhile HTC have set tongues wagging by fettling a version of the Touch HD for a Russian WiMAX carrier: they assure us that the HTC MAX 4G won’t be showing up anywhere else, but forgive us if we’re natural sceptics. Meanwhile Verizon finally confirmed that the BlackBerry Storm 9530 would hit stores on November 24th, priced from $199.99, AT&T released the QuickFire, and Nokia confirmed the open-secret that is the E63 smartphone.
JP
