You know you’re going to burn your video to disc sooner or later. Why not do it the moment you record it? With DVD camcorders, you can browse, edit, and rearrange the order of scenes right on the camera. And once you’re done shooting, transferring videos to your computer or DVD player is as simple as popping in a disc.… Read the rest
Mobile PC
Olympus Ferrari Digital Model 2004
Some brand names transcend price: Rolex. Bulgari. Trojan. And some, like Ferrari, have a value that can easily be computed. In the case of the Olympus-built Ferrari Digital Model 2004, that value is about $400 — the premium you’d pay over a comparable 3.2-megapixel camera with more prosaic styling and branding.… Read the rest
Fisher FVD-C1 Pocket CameraCorder
The Fisher FVD-C1 Pocket CameraCorder’s unusual shape tips you off that something went terribly wrong in the design studio at Sanyo (Fisher’s parent company). The concept is good: Pair a decent 3.2-megapixel still camera with the ability to take MPEG-4 compressed videos, add sound recording and a friendly female voice to tell you what’s going on.… Read the rest
Panasonic SV-AV100 D-snap
A little thicker than a box of Altoids, the D-snap packs video recording and still-photo capabilities into a package small enough to fit in a pants pocket or behind a potted plant. Despite its size, the D-snap takes remarkably good videos — comparable to, or even slightly better than, the full-size DVD camcorders here — and its LCD is actually no smaller than that of most full-size camcorders.… Read the rest
Sierra Wireless Voq Professional
Get ready to meet the next big innovation in mobile communications technology: the hinge.
The Sierra Wireless Voq Professional phone is a rather ordinary-looking, somewhat bulky handset with a traditional 12-button keypad. Flip back the keypad and you reveal a miniscule QWERTY keyboard concealed inside, making the phone into a rather ordinary-looking, somewhat bulky handset with a keyboard sticking out to one side.… Read the rest
Research in Motion BlackBerry 7780
Research in Motion turned the corporate world on its ear with the first BlackBerry pagers, which gave middle managers the power to hound subordinates 24/7, no matter where in the world the expense account took them. Later, RIM grafted mobile phone capabilities onto its pagers, producing functional — if unlovely — smart phones that were able to plow through calls, e-mails, contacts, and calendars like Frankenstein knocking down a row of angry peasants.… Read the rest
The Ultimate Travel Toolkit
Spire Nova
Most messenger bags fall into one of two camps: gigantic shapeless sacks on the one hand and precious, overorganized, zipper-encrusted man-purses on the other. Spire’s Nova bag is neither: It provides plenty of carrying capacity and organizing space in a shoulder bag that looks professional.… Read the rest
Iomega REV 35GB/90GB External Drive
The first thing you need to know about the Iomega REV 35GB/90GB drive is that its name is a lie. The REV is an external hard drive with removable 35GB hard-disk cartridges, plain and simple. The “90GB” part of its name refers to the amount of data you could, in theory, store on each cartridge using data compression – but that’s assuming an extreme rate of compression that you’ll probably never see in your lifetime, particularly if you have many MP3 or JPEG files.… Read the rest
Olympus DS-660 Digital Voice Recorder
If you put your ear up close to the speaker grille on the Olympus DS-660 Digital Voice Recorder, you can hear the faint, distant screams of agonized microcassette manufacturers. For years, portable audio recording meant fumbling with these infernal tapes, which often broke, tangled, got demagnetized, or melted on your dashboard, and had terrible sound quality besides.… Read the rest