It was a gorgeous sunny day so I went and shot some more Mino HD/Kodak Zi6 side-by-side demos. I wanted to know if the overcast weather had thrown the Kodak last week. If it’s been “coached” to treat everything like there’s plenty of light and lots of highlights and shadows, maybe it had simply gotten bamboozled.

I haven’t cut the video together yet (Final Cut Express just arrived yesterday; this is Project One for the app). For now, I can tell you that my conclusions still stand. You can see for yourself and make your own conclusions soon enough.

I’m actually planning a rather ambitious comparison of cheap HD cameras in the next week or so. But there’s certainly been an enthusiastic — bordering on, well, “annoying” — amount of interest in a direct comparison between the Mino HD and its natural commercial enemy: the Kodak Zi6.

And no wonder. They’re both the same sort of beastie: pockatable 720p HD cameras in an iPod-ish form factor, selling for about the same money.

(Yes, the Zi6 is about fifty bucks cheaper, but remember: that’s without any memory. Toss in a 4 gig card and you’re more or less square a bit closer to the Mino in price.)

With the holidays coming up, and the chance that Todd from Process Control will make as big an ass of himself at the breakroom holiday party as he did last year, lots of people want to know which of these Discreet Little Cameras to buy. Well, my uniform is proud to serve.

I took both cameras out for a jaunt or two and shot a bunch of clips in a variety of environments. Watch. Draw your own conclusions. And then read on and see if you’re so absolutely brilliant that your conclusions are identical to mine.

Click on the “fullscreen” button to watch it at 1280×720 resolution…just keep in mind that this is nowhere near as good as the original video files.

Flip Mino HD vs. Kodak Zi6 from Andy Ihnatko on Vimeo.

Okay. Based solely on this footage…it’s a clear win for the Mino. I think it’s obvious even in the Vimeo (which has been processed twice already). But here in iMovie, where I can see the original footage straight from the camera…t’s absolutely no contest. The Mino video is more agile, the colors are more accurate, and the lighting is more balanced. The Zi6 routinely produces over-saturated colors and doesn’t appear to have enough bandwidth to record a full range of colors and tones. And low-light shooting is a bit of a mess.

Three full-sized frame grabs illustrate my point. These were taken straight from the original MP4 files. Click the thumbnail for the full 720p frame.

Pulling Out Into Traffic

Mino HD: Note the gray tones in the sky and the cream color of the sign. There's plenty of shadow detail inside the car, too.

Kodak Zi6. The sky and the sign are white, all of a sudden. And inside the car, shadows have turned to mud.

Outdoors, On A Tripod

Mino HD. Nice shot. Maybe it should be a tad brighter. But the lighting is natural and the colors are spot-on.

My shirt is purple, my skin is a little weird (even for me). I think the Zi6's designers told it "Humans like punchy contrast and saturated colors. Err accordingly."

Inside Panera Bread

Mino HD. Nice, bright image with (again) natural colors...not an easy trick, as we're inside a Panera Bread with its muted soup-oriented lighting.

Zi6. Boy, what a crummy at-bat. The wall should be avocado, not lime green. Any shadows have turned into grey mud. My sunglasses are no longer transparent, nor did the Zi6 capture any reflections off the lenses. And it shows that dim lighting is the Zi6's Waterloo. Its only solution in a situation like this is to extend the shutter speed and cut the frame rate in half. This clip was recorded at 15 frames per second instead of the Mino's 30, creating choppy, blurry footage.

Rainy Street Corner

Mino HD. Hmm. The sky is a bit purple. But otherwise...a nice shot. Check out the brick building on the corner. You can see the bricks on the outside and the details of the warm shop inside.

Zi6. This individual frame doesn't look too bad. The Zi6 certainly captured the sky more naturally than the Mino did. But as usual, shadow details have turned to mud...and the dim light has forced the Zi6 to shoot this at 15 frames per second. Quite noticeable when cars drive past.

Okay, so this is a total slam-dunk for the Mino HD, right? It’s time for the Zi6 to slink off to the corner bar to drink itself into a state of apoplexy alongside the Zune and the Sony eBook Reader and every other bit of technology that’s been roundly spanked and made irrelevant by a superior competitor?

Naw, not at all.

Based on two days’ worth of side-by-side shooting, I’m convinced that the Mino HD’s videos are far more natural and pleasant. But I wish that Mino HD videos sounded as good as the Kodak’s. I don’t know if the Zi6’s designers did something as simple as choosing a high gain level for the microphone. Whatever the reason, the “outside Panera” clip handily demonstrates the Kodak’s superiority in this category.

The Zi6 also has the intriguing advantage of being able to go on forever. Which is something that the Mino emphatically cannot do.

The Mino is sealed up as tightly as an iPhone. Its memory and battery are locked inside and can’t be swapped. You record one hour’s worth of video and then the Mino HD becomes nothing more than a conversation piece.

But the Zi6 takes standard SDHC memory cards. To hell with the Mino’s built-in 4 gigs! Buy yourself a 16 gig card and record hours and hours of footage. And because it runs on 2 AA’s, it’ll can run forever. The Zi6 comes with a pair of rechargeables and natcherly, if you ever get caught short, you can just run to the store for some Energizers.

That’s not an inconsiderable advantage.

The Zi6 and the Mino are both “lifestyle” cameras. So I suppose the choice comes down to the sort of lifestyle that you intend to lead.

If image quality is a big item on your wish list, it’s the Mino. If your style of shooting is casual and unplanned — you want to have something handy to shoot baby’s first steps, keep something in your back pocket or your desk drawer in case the opportunity to direct and produce the next “Don’t Taze Me, Bro!” should unexpectedly present itself — it’s the Mino. If you’ll be shooting lots of stuff in low-light situations…the Mino. Already own a “real” camcorder, and want a second one for more casual shooting and the ability to shoot an event from two angles? Mino.

(Oh, I didn’t mention that the Mino is exactly the same size as the original Mino. The Zi6 is small enough to fit inside any pocket, but the Mino is so small that you’ll have to pat yourself down to figure out what pocket it’s even in.)

But if you’re going to shoot “events,” then you’ll want the Zi6. Although you’ll yearn for the higher quality of the Mino, the fact remains that (God help us all) most family weddings go on for more than an hour. And you have better things to do on vacation than keep running back to your hotel room or cabin to free up space on your camcorder. You can shoot a whole week’s worth of travelly hijinx on the Zi6.

As for the ease of editing your footage…it’s a draw. Both of these cameras record plain MP4 movie files. They imported into iMovie as easily as any other MP4 file.

Weird thing about the Flip, though: iMovie recognizes it as a camera and it immediately loads up thumbnails of all of your clips, ready for import…but the import will fail. Huh. But if you import the clips via the “File” menu — treat the Mino as though it were just a USB storage device — iMovie will copy the files into your library without a hitch. No transcoding necessary…it’s just a straight file copy.

Of course, neither of these are “real” camcorders. Spending a couple of days shooting with them made me miss the zoom lens, image-stabilization, and manual features of even a cheap standard-def camera. I guess the “lifestyle” implied by the Zi6 and the Mino involves walking straight up to people instead of recording them from a safe distance, and maintaining a steady posture as you do so.

If this is the case, then clearly I lead an alternative lifestyle.

There’s a reason why I’ve held off on my big review of Kodak’s “lifestyle”-grade pocket HD camcorder…and my Cone of Press Secrecy lifted today.

Yes, Flip was working on a high-definition version of the Flip Mino. Mine arrived just about an hour ago; it’s charging up as I write this so obviously…no sample video yet. Plus, there’s the pesky problem of “this week’s column” to finish.

But to answer your firstest questions:

• It records in 720p (1280×720 at 16:9 widescreen ratio).
• It has 4 gigs of storage, which promises to hold an hour of HD video.
• It looks identical to the old Mino…just marginally wider and thicker.
• Like the old Mino, there’s no card slot and the battery is sealed in.
• $229, or just $50 more than the standard-def Mino (which remains in the lineup).

Oh, and iMovie recognizes it immedately and imports HD content directly…when I plugged it in to charge, iMovie activated and showed me thumbnails of a few samples that were already on the device.

More comments, video, and of course a full review — comparing the Flip HD, Kodak Zi6, the Aiptek Action HD (aka “The Walmart Camera”) against my Panasonic HDC-SD1 (aka the “real” HD camcorder) will follow.

Until then…There Will Be Blood. Er…photos. The HD edition is on the right…to the left is the standard-rez Mino.

[Updated: Yes, the Flip HD is immediately recognized by iMovie. Yes, it presents you with an import panel of thumbnails. But! None of them can be imported. Instead, you need to use the desktop app to import videos from the Flip. Let's hope that it works with Perian. Stay tuned.]

[And the HD model is exactly the same size as the original Mino. Sorry folks...blame the optical illusion of that light-colored band around the original model.]

Greetings from New York City. I can confirm that the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down; the Mayor says that his “strike zone” counter-drug program is dworking but the signs of amphetamine and barbiturate use in the local populace are impossible to miss.

Yup, yesterday was a travel day. I arrived in the city on just 90 minutes of sleep. Suffice to say that I could have used trip to the Bronx and Part 2 of the Great Google Phone Brain Dump had to wait.

So let’s continue with the Google Phone Brain Dump. The first topic in today’s installment is so important that I’m going to do a solo:

The Touch Interface Versus The Clickbutton Interface

Or:

The G1 Is Not An iPhone…And That’s Not A Complaint

The big gotcha of a job like mine is that I have to bury my prejudices and preconceptions when I try out something new. Because though there are retreads and ripoffs in every product category — and the iPhone spawned more bad sequels than “Rocky” and “Saw” combined — it’s entirely possible that something new is, indeed, Something New.

During my first day with the G1, I grumbled and I groused. I clucked and I tut-tutted. The pitching coach picked up the bullpen phone and messaged that it was time to warm up the standard “Yet Another Damned iPhone Ripoff” commentary.

On the plus side, the G1’s touchscreen is terrific from a hardware perspective. It’s a flat glass panel that responds to finger contact, not a mushy piece of plastic that needs to be pressed, like the worst of the iPhone influencees.

I did encounter curious moments in which an onscreen button refused to respond to the edge of my thumb (as when you’re holding the phone in your left and) and instead demanded a rather explicit fingertip (which I was more than willing to give it, after three failed buttonpresses). But that’s probably a software problem and not a hardware one.

Good, good. But the G1’s touch-interface experience is incomplete and unfulfilling. On the iPhone, the touch interface is gravity, oxygen. Every action and activity is influenced by it. On the G1, the touch interface is just a feature. Even after a week with the G1, it’s hard to detect any real commitment to touch on the part of Android’s developers.

When you’re using the G1’s touchscreen you’re forced to change mindsets often. Sometimes the interface is up there on the screen. Sometimes, it’s down there among the mechanical buttons.

I’m in the browser, just messing around. I tap on a picture and a dialog box pops up. Would I like to Save this picture? Open it in a new window? View it?

Hey, cool. Thank you, Android; that’s a good feature in a mobile browser. But actually, for the moment I’d just like to Cancel. I’ll just tap the “Cancel” button…

Oh. No “Cancel” button.

After I moment’s confusion, I realize that I have to press the clicky “Back” button underneath the screen. The Back button is a consistent part of the user interface (it always takes you one step back away from wherever you are) but shouldn’t there be a Cancel button right in the onscreen dialog box?

The browser, in fact, is the best illustration of the problem. I’m astonished that Android doesn’t have a virtual keyboard.

“Hold the phone!” you’re saying. I’m about to make a joke about how I am in fact holding an actual phone but you wisely don’t pause long enough to let me draw my gun. “That’s my big complaint about the iPhone! Being forced to write emails on a ‘fake’ keyboard instead of the cushy comfort of the Blackberry keyboard!”

Yes, and we’ll be getting to the G1’s keyboard in a moment.

But a phone that claims to be usable in both portrait and landscape modes needs an onscreen keyboard.

Viz: I want to see if my friends have posted new photos to Flickr. I press the mechanical “Menu” button and then I tap the onscreen “Open URL” button. That’s a major modal disconnection but I’ve already complained about that so let’s move on:

I need to type in “m.flickr.com.” Which means I have to turn the phone on its side and slide open the keyboard.

I’m a big dumb Human, so when I type the URL and hit “Return” I close the keyboard and return the G1 to its original position while the page loads. Damn. Now I need to log in.

Turn, open, type, close, turn.

I acknowledge that this isn’t a hell of a lot of effort. But web browsing is mostly a passive, non-typey sort of activity. Every now and then you need to type a URL or a password and every time I’m forced to Transformer the device to do this trivial thing, I taste copper.

A minor aside: obvious errors like the lack of an onscreen keyboard are what bother me the most about Android. If I make a comparison to a current Presidential campaign I know that certain readers will Hulk Out a little so instead, I ask you to remember how you felt when Mike Dukakis tooled around at a campaign stop in a tank.

You imagined him making “Vroom! B-Pow! Budda-budda-KRACK-POWWW!!!” noises as he went.

Which is precisely what I would have done in such a situation. Perfectly understandable. No, it isn’t the actual thing itself that caused you to sour on Dukakis. The chill came from the realization that it was such an obvious mistake. The sort of mistake where you wondered exactly where the ceiling was on the man’s mistake-making abilities.

Not all plumbers are kind enough to (for instance) mount your new toilet on the wall instead of the floor. Obvious mistake. You red-flag that one almost immediately and stop payment on the check. You’re almost grateful. Why? Because you could have gotten the sort of plumber who forgot to bring right kind of soil-stack pipe and just substituted whatever he happened to have in the truck.

That’s trouble. you don’t know what sort of trouble you’re in until much later, when there’s this incredible smell coming out of your new bathroom and you discover that a crack in the joint has been slowly filling the wallspace with human waste for the past five weeks. As men in Hazmat suits are ripping out the walls and the flooring, you remember seeing the plumber’s truck as it pulled in and thinking “What kind of a man hangs chrome bull testicles off the back of his car?” and now you know the answer. You wish you’d followed that first pang of doubt to its logical conclusion.

Yeah, yeah. I could have just written “No onscreen keyboard? Really?” but look, the lack of an onscreen keyboard is bloody annoying. Let’s hope that a developer comes up with a third-party solution.

I didn’t appreciate how nice a true multitouch display is until I started using the G1. I just naturally expected to pinch and stretch things. But every time I tried, the G1 reacted only with a polite cough and an arched eyebrow.

Even basic touch actions things like scrolling don’t work as well as I would have hoped. “Very good” isn’t good enough. In a touch interface, either the finger-scrolling is absolutely perfect or it isn’t. Touch-scrolling on an iPhone is absolutely perfect. On the G1, it isn’t. There’s just enough of a lag that you don’t feel an organic connection to the interface.

So: Android touch interface = Disappointing.

I can’t help but write the review in my head as put a new thing through its paces. I imagined a paragraph that began “In fact, eventually I gave up on the touch interface and started using it almost exclusively with the keyboard deployed.”

I intended for this to sting. Surely its developers would throw themselves out of windows when they read that line. Waiters would seat them at the table near the bathroom. Assuming that their spouses ever even made love to them again, their lovemaking technique would be posted and critiqued on eOpinions.com immediately after each session.

(You laugh, but just go to the site and look for content created in the weeks after my Zune 1.0 review was published.)

Imagine! A touch-based phone where you wind up using the keyboard and the microtrackball all the time!

Then I had one of those moments where I suspected, just suspected, mind you, that I might be a moron. It’s okay for the G1 to not be like the iPhone. It just needs to find greatness via the path of its choosing.

I stopped thinking of the G1 as an iPhone-like device and the scales fell from my eyes almost immediately. I started to see that the G1 is really quite awesome.

Truly. The G1 isn’t a touch phone. It’s a clickybutton phone. Held like an iPhone, it’s clumsy and awkward. Held on its side…well, damn.

Android’s clickybutton interface is consistent and easy to suss out:

You got your microtrackball: that’s yer pointing and clicking device. North of it is the Back button. Use it to take one step back from wherever you are. The Menu button is to the West. It brings up the application menu of whatever app you’re running. Tap the Home button due south to get to the Home screen, which acts as an application launcher and (as with the iPhone’s Springboard) gives you access to phone settings and other “above the title” functions.

(Sorry. Continuing.)

They’re all arranged within casual reach of your right thumb. And remember, the clickybuttonpad is canted up slightly, making the phone very comfortable and grippable.

Holding the G1 on its side with its trackball under your thumb has an immediate psychological impact. Yes, the onscreen touch interface is inconsistent and poorly-thought. But you stop even thinking about that interface. The trackball is your connection to this machine, not the tip of your finger.

And then the G1 starts to really sing. “Back” as a “Cancel” button? Makes perfect sense. Specify a URL by bringing up an application menu, instead of just tapping in the browser’ address bar? Sure.

Sickeningly, the G1 starts to feel faster than an iPhone. At least the bit where you translate a thought into a correctly-inputted command. The onscreen buttons are big, fat targets that you can briskly and efficiently trackball into.

One of my top five functions for a smartphone is reading blogs via Bloglines or Google Reader. The G1 reminded me how nice it is to have an explicit “Page Down” button. It’s a particular luxury when I’m Smartphoning with my left hand and Sandwiching with my right. Zap straight to the bottom or the top of something? There are keyboard shortcuts for that, as well.

I even started to get the hang of the thumbboard. And I’ve always hated thumbboards. Although I must cite the fact that I can type way, way faster on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard than I can on any thumbboard (record for typing Robert Frost’s “In Winter In The Woods Alone”: 48 words per minute) I must also report that I didn’t consider the G1’s keyboard to be an annoyance.

I wouldn’t say that the Android clickyinterface is better than the iPhone’s. But it’s different, and I have to insist that a power G1 user will leave an iPhone user in the dust, in certain tasks.

Why? Because there are clickybutton shortcuts for everything.

My favorite reaction when I’m trying a new device is when I discover something about it causes me to find a new disappointment in an old device that I love. Holding down the G1’s “Home” button instantly brings up a launcher containing your six most recently-launched apps. Damn…I wish I could do that on my iPhone. I’m always forced to click the Home button and then scrollscrollSCROLL(dammit)scroll to get to the Camera app…which I use alllll the time.

(Yes, there are four slots on the iPhone springboard where you can keep your favorites. But hello…I have more than four commonly-used apps.)

Buttons do different things when you double-click or click-and-hold. And you can assign a keyboard shortcut to almost anything.

Result: it would be trivially easy to set up a realistic, real-world triathalon of smartphone tasks in which a sophisticated iPhone user would finish in a hopeless (correction: utterly hopeless) second-place to an similarly-experienced G1 user.

Caveats:

1. You can’t say a line like “Zapping back to the top of the page is as simple as holding down the ALT key and flicking the trackball up” and still believe that the sophistication of user interface design in general is still trending upward.
2. The power of the clickyinterface, like the true face of God, reveals itself to you in tantalizing sections, and at its own frustratingly-slow pace. You will need to read the manual, and even then you will fail to remember what many of these shortcuts are. Especially when you’re trying to convince an iPhone user that your spiffy new Google Phone is way faster than his.
3. I’m the sort of person who scoffs and asks a Blackberry power-user “So: you saved yourself a little time by creating a new message to your boss via a hotkey, instead of launching the Mail app and tapping the first couple of letters of her name manually. Tell me, whatever are you going to do with that extra 1.7 seconds of free time you’ve gained?”

Well, there are people who put a real premium on getting from Point A to Point B via the absolute shortest distance possible. That’s their workflow. Suffice to say that these people, baffled by the perceived inefficiency of the iPhone, will love the G1. The G1 serves as an important reminder that “most advanced” is not always synonymous with “most effective.”

That said, I ought to close this section out with an observation: though the clickybutton interface is quite agile and pleasant to use, it has inescapable limitations. Yes, you can easily get through all of the Four Major Food Groups of the smartphone experience (Mailin’, Browsin’, Textin’, and…er, Dairy) without ever reaching for the screen. But the psychological oomph of a clickyinterface is the persistent connection between your fingers and the controls. Every time you need to take your hands off the buttons and interact with the screen, it’s a defeat. You lose time. You also break that mental connection for just a moment.

So what happens when you want your phone to go beyond the basic expectations of a smartphone?

The iPhone has no buttons (please ignore the big Home button under the screen; it has been placed there by opposition-party operatives who fear my maverick, pro-change agenda). Which means that it can have any buttons. It can have the perfect button controls for a web browser. Or a GPS navigator. Or a music player. Or a plane simulator. Or…or…or.

Whatever the need is, the iPhone immediately reconfigures the interface to meet you. By contrast, when a G1 owner feels the need to go beyond mere utilitarian functions, they’re going to feel like a DOS user in a Mac and Windows world.

The key line in my Sun-Times review was this one: from a user perspective, the G1 is not a revolutionary next-step towards anything. That’s the goal of the iPhone. The goal of the G1 and Android is simply to be a smartphone.

And the G1 is truly a great smartphone. It’s a strong and compelling implementation of the “big screen phone with a flip-out keyboard” concept. Potentially, it’s the best smartphone on the market. If the iPhone didn’t exist, I’d buy a G1 in a heartbeat, forsaking all others.

The G1 versus Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry

I did intend to just make this a solo piece, but that last line sort of compels me to continue straight on and talk about the G1 in relationship with its competition.

G1 versus iPhone: I don’t see these two phones as being in competition with each other. As with movies, when you judge technology you should consider the maker’s goals and evaluate how successfully those goals were met. Apple didn’t just want to build a smartphone. They wanted to create a whole new computing platform.

The iPhone 3G is as close as we’ve ever come to the ideal of “that one device you carry with you everywhere, that does everything you could ever want a mobile device to do.” And (goddamn it) the iPhone 3G more or less succeeds.

The G1 is an awesome smartphone. But it’s a crappy media player, for example. If you buy a G1 expecting it to be an iPhone, then there will be many, many scenarios in which you will travel with way more devices and chargers than you had hoped.

G1 versus Symbian and Windows Mobile. I see the G1 as having huge advantages over both of these operating systems. It’s not slam-dunk superior, but personally, its fundamental strengths would compel me to take an Android phone over either alternative.

Symbian and WM are venerable institutions with massive software libraries. If you’re in love with a certain Windows Mobile app or apps, that should be your decisionmaker.

But these operating systems are trapped by their history. Their designs go back to the Nineties and at times, this comes through in their products…subtly, from an architecture perspective, and frustratingly from a user-interface perspective.

Whenever I get a new Windows Mobile touchscreen phone to play with, I steel myself. I start to play with the “kewl” iPhone-inspired touch interface but I know that it’ll be minutes before I touch something the wrong way and the Windows Mobile start menu and taskbar will temporarily appear. Inevitably, I’ll be looking at an alert system that was designed back when Clinton was president.

The iPhone and the G1 have great advantages over every other smartphone OS thanks to the simple fact that its designers got to start from scratch in the mid-Aughties. They never considered a world in which screens were small and black-and white. These phones never had to exist in a world without WiFi and mobile broadband.

Yes, I manfully acknowledge the possibility that the designers of the latest edition of Windows Mobile 6 are aware that you can now receive email on the road without having to stick a phone handset into an acoustic coupler. What I’m getting at is that History can often become a terrible liability as 1.o becomes 2.0 and ultimately 6.0 becomes Vista. History becomes Baggage. When Baggage becomes corporate philosophy, the only solution is to nuke the whole compound from space.

You see this sort of thing time and time again. A database program doesn’t support XML, because Version 1.0 was created before the standard became a Big Deal and the schema underpinning the entire system doesn’t provide a simple way to store data that way. That’s mere Baggage. “Why would our users even want to use XML, when we can provide them with a much more sophisticated proprietary package format?” is a sign that the disease and the product have reached the terminal stage. I hear it allll the time.

I have a personal prejudice against Symbian, though I think its a defensible one: it’s woefully out of step with modern mobile computing and every new iteration is just another boob and butt lift on an increasingly frail body. I think it’s coasting by on its enormous international user base and software library.

I thought Windows Mobile was the greatest mobile OS out there, before the iPhone was released. And I still think it’s terrific. But Microsoft is going to need to make that “MacOS 9 to Mac OS X” transition sometime soon. You know what I mean: the gutsy moment when they decide to throw out every scrap of code and start all over again. Not because what they have now is garbage…because the world has changed around it and its current architecture is going to find it hard to keep up.

(My hometown tore down its high school recently for much the same reason. The building itself was in fine shape, but it had been built at a time when weatherstripping, network infrastructure, and controlling access to school property weren’t on anybody’s radar.)

The big caveat about the G1 — more about Android, actually — is that it is indeed a 1.0 OS. But cripes, it’s a free OS, and the whole world is welcome to enhance it. Symbian is royalty-free these days, true, but it’s like General Motors. Symbian feels like an organization that would rather walk to the guillotine than whistle the songs of the revolutionaries.

Give it a year and Android going to become a serious challenger for anybody trying to make a smartphone OS.

G1 versus Palm. Bit of a toss-up. Palm is old-fashioned and you’re sort of embarrassed to still be using one, but it’s just so convenient, you know? My iPhone battery started to die yesterday so of course I looked up the address where I was meeting a friend and wrote it on the palm of my hand so I wouldn’t lose it. Top that for convenience.

Huh?

Palm OS, you say?

“Spock, what does the ship’s computer have to say about this ‘Palm OS’?”

“Accessing, sir…details are sketchy but the library claims that Palm Oil Spray was a consumer brand of aerosol food-preparation lubricant sold in the late Twentieth to early Twenty-First century. It was taken off the market when it was determined that prolonged exposure led to increasingly-erratic behavior, such as wearing trousers with words printed across the seat in large letters adorned with light-refracting crystals.”

“Set phasers on ‘Stun,’ Mister Chekov. Fire at will.”

G1 versus Blackberry. I keep trying the new Blackberries as they come out and I keep coming to the same conclusion: the Blackberry is an email device “with benefits.” Every app I use has to be described as “a spreadsheet you can use on your Blackberry” or somesuch, instead of being praisable as a destination of its own.

Which isn’t a slam against the whole platform. It’s just that a Blackberry an office chair. Your first day in a new job, you’re issued this thing. It’s perfectly comfortable and you take absolutely no notice of it until it breaks, and then someone from Maintenance comes by and fixes it or gives you a new one.

There are chairs which are designed to get you excited about sitting in them. But the only office where you’ll find such a thing is the offices and studio of the Howard Stern Show. And it appears that they’re only issued to female employees.

A Blackberry would be the very last thing you’d buy for yourself. Well, maybe if you’re going to a Halloween dressed as a Hollywood douchebag.

Okay. The City awaits. Tomorrow, let’s talk about apps and the G1’s camera.

Part of the fun and part of the agony of my job is that tech companies often offer to show me something cool several weeks before they go public with it, under the condition that I keep my lips zipped until The Big Day.

The latter half is the agony part. Sometimes, anyway. Because I get the briefing and then I find myself sitting on something so gorgeously bizarre that I can’t wait to talk about it.

But a promise is a promise.

Still, I felt that there was no harm in posting a certain JPEG to my Flickr account:

…described only as a piece of Mystery Art for an upcoming project. No harm done…though some part of me worried that people would be able to figure out what this was for. There are a couple of telltale…well, tells. It’s obvious if you’re familiar with the product in question.

Well, today the NDA is over and done with and I can tell you what this piece of artwork is for. But why tell you, when through the miracle of the fine work of the Joint Photographic Experts Group?

Voilá:

Yes, the fine makers of the Flip Mino pocket digital video camera have added a new twist: if you order online, you can now customize your Flip at no extra charge. Pick from a library of hundreds of stock images, use their online pattern and texture generator…or just upload a JPEG.

Which, naturally, was what drew my immediate interest. It’s not revolutionary, it’s not a game-changer, it doesn’t an anything-killer. It’s a completely unnecessary. And of course, under the skin it’s the same Flip Mino, with the same limitations.

But it’s coooooolllllll.

Flip sent me a coupon code so that I could try it out for myself. I loaded up my Flickr album of Good Photos, and hastily eyed the shot of Peter Cohen’s Apple hair. But my hand was soon stayed. This is a video camera. A camera which I can customize with any image. Was a dude with an Apple logo spray-painted into his hair really the best choice?

No, no. Why, this was an opportunity to produce a Flip Mino that truly benefitted Humanity. I’ve always thought little video cameras like these should come with a warning label that could be seen by anybody facing the lens. I suddenly had the power to make that dream a reality:

But as soon as I got the idea of owning an (un)official Martin Scorsese Flip Mino, an alarming percentage of my CPU’s duty cycles were irrevocably committed to the project.

Of course, the front face of a Flip Mino is not exactly a forgiving medium. I found out after I made a Photoshop template and struggled to come up with a working image. It’s that damned lens. No matter where I put Scorsese’s portrait, the lens-hole chewed through half his face and made him look like the T-1000 Terminator just after he’d been shotgunned. Either you already happen to have a picture in which all of the content is crowded into the bottom two-thirds of the image, or else you need to design something in two “sections,” as it were.

After a quick tour through my DVD collection, a session of screenshotting the opening titles from “Casino,” and an extended session of fidgeting, I had it. And a few days after uploading the JPEG into Flip’s online tool, I had the actual “it.”

It came out great. The colors are screen-perfect and I’m especially impressed with how accurately the real thing matches the online mockup:

So I now have a one-of-a-kind, limited-edition and completely unauthorized Martin Scorsese video camera. It’s so cool that I kind of don’t even want to use it, for fear of scratching it up.

Besides, it’s sort of a shame to use a Martin Scorsese Digital Camcorder without a special Thelma Schoonmaker-themed edition of iMovie, isn’t it?

The frustrating catch-22 of my job is that oftentimes, a really cool and long-awaited thing arrives on my doorstep at a time when I’m suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous editors. I sign for a long, skinny package. From the return address, I know that this contains the Spear of Destiny, a conduit of unspeakable mystical force conferring unbounded powers upon he who can wield it with wisdom and purity.

But I promised an editor that by the end of the day, I’d send her 450 words about what sort of phone Fidel Castro should buy. So Christ’s Lance has to stay in its consecrated bubble wrap.

The Neuros OSD arrived last week. Conceptually, it’s an intensely great idea: it’s a modern digital version of a VCR. I already have plenty of ways to convert a movie or a TV show into a video file that I can throw onto my server or sync to my phone or iPod. None of them are as simple as just picking up a remote control, pushing a “Record” button, and having whatever’s playing on your TV copied to a bit of removable media.

It does plenty of other things, o’course. But if the Neuros works as simply and effectively as a VCR, it’ll make digital media easy and relevant to a whole new population of normal humans. Getting a DVD or last night’s Letterman onto a smartphone is still heavy voodoo to most people; too many steps, too many technologies. Ideally, the Neuros reduces it to nothing more than pulling a MiniSD card from a trim little set-top box and then sliding it into the phone’s memory slot. Done and done.

The season finale of “Project Runway” starts in an hour. Let’s see if I can get this set up in time to record the show on a memory card and then watch it on the eee PC’s open-source video player.

Naturally I don’t even look at the manual. Instead, I fish out the foldup “Abbreviated Users Guide.”

…

Umm…

…

Wow. This might be the first “Quick Start”-type of insert that’s harder to follow than the actual manual. Well, if the Neuros is like a VCR, then the installation and setup should be pretty obvious.

The AC adapter has one of those cool right-angle plugs that slips right into an empty socket on my power strip. It’s a small touch but I always appreciate that.

…But it turns out that the power strip under the TV also has space-saving right-angle plugs. So the two conveniences cancel each other out. Not even remotely Neuros’ fault but still…damn and blast.

The Neuros is a trim little box and it doesn’t have room for a full bank of video connectors. Instead, the video in and out are 1/8″ jacks. Two 1/8″ to composite-video cables are included. This ought to be as simple as hooking up any other sort of video component: I’ll just stick it between the DVD burner and the TV.

There is the usual fear as I’m about to do something to a Working System that could turn it into a Not Working System. But yup, just patch in a couple of plugs and presto: the picture comes back on the Bravo Project Runway Marathon. Now there’s a Neuros menu overlaid on the picture electronically.

I load up the Neuros remote control with the two no-name probably highly toxic AAA batteries that came in the box and press a button marked “Home” which looks like it might be helpful. Presto, the menu I saw comes back on.

Let’s see how far I get without consulting any of the documentation.

Here’s a “Getting Started” menu item. Click. Neat, a whole “Read Me” sort of deal. I learn that there’s a Help button on the remote for each menu item and option. What happens if I press the help button during help?

Oooo…it dumps you out of the readme and puts you back at the top menu.

About the remote: it’s a very generic plastic OEM remote with Neuros labels silkscreened on it.

As I write this, electronic menu overlay gets tired of waiting and returns me to plain live video (which is absolutely the correct answer). I’m pleased that I don’t have to stop watching live video when I’m navigating menus.

Odd, though: there’s an audible mechanical click as the overlay appears and disappears. I’m guessing that this is a sign that the box has a “pass-thru” mode that it uses when it’s not doing anything productive (as opposed to always “owning” the channel and merely choosing when to add graphics).

Hit “Home” to get the help doc again. Hmm, picture loses sync for a fraction of a second when the overlay first appears. Not disruptive, but not a “polished” response.

There is a universal “Back” button for taking one step back through whatever menu you’ve drilled down into. Nice touch. And a button marked “Xim,” apparently. Which I’m sure looked great on a whiteboard but it’s a word that means nothing.

Actually, let’s just go to UrbanDictionary.com and see if it means nothing.

…Good, there’s no listing for “Xim.” When I see a word I don’t understand (or worse, am about to use a word that I only think I understand) it’s a good idea to check the UD. Usually it actually means something positively filthy that kids that age never did when I was in junior high.

If they did, they never invited me, anyway.

Okay. So we’re making great progress. 30 minutes of installation, including writing all of this stuff, and it appears that I had it up and working 15 minutes ago. Let’s just head right for the good stuff: recording live video onto a SDHC card.

Looks straightforward. “Record • Schedule” menu item is the obvious choice (though I hesitate; I don’t want to set up a scheduled recording, I just want to record something immediately. But apparently the bullet means “and/or.”

“Recording Settings.” Gee, interesting: it lists a handful of typical devices (iPod, PSP, TV, Smartphone). I assume each of these is a different bitrate and size. I also assume that the best of the four presets would be TV or Sony PSP.

I do know that the Neuros uses MP4 as its recording format so I doubt it’s a codec choice. Click.

Now it wants to know the recording length. Hmm. I thought this was “preferences” sort of place (ie, “Mr. Neuros, please use these settings every time I press the ‘record’ button on the remote”). Is it going to try to start recording right now? Let’s see.

“Select storage location.”

Umm…

I don’t have anything hooked up yet. I see a “Shortcuts” menu and a “Network” menu. Let’s see what happens when I slip an 8 gig SDHC card into a slot there.

(Hmm. It’s hard to read these slots. The Neuros has several for the many different types of cards, plus a USB port. But they’re black on a black faceplate labeled with tiny letters. And when you’re watching TV, you usually have the lights dimmed, too.)

Card is in. No apparent change in the menu. I was hoping for a “Save video to the SDHC memory card you just inserted” menu item or something. Time to start clicking things at random. Maybe you set storage location under “shortcuts.” The only other choice is “network” and it can’t possibly be that.

UH-oh. “Press ENTER key to select storage location,” screen says…but screen appears to be locked up.

Yup, “Enter,” “Home,” “Back,” arrow keys, “Help”…no joy, it’s frozen. No blinking lights or anything on the box either. Time to cut power and restart, I think.

Actually, I removed the card and then the Neuros unfroze and moved on to the next screen in the operation. Odd; it’s a standard FAT-formatted card fresh from my digital camera.

And yes, it did assume that I wanted to record immediately. When I pulled the card it gave me a (polite) error saying that there wasn’t enough storage space.

Let’s try that again. I’m back at the main menu and now I’ll stick the card back in.

Hmm. This is no good; presence of the card locks up the box no matter what it’s doing that moment.

Let’s try formatting the card, to remove that as a variable. I don’t suppose it’s even possible that it doesn’t support SDHC?

I’ll be damned…no it doesn’t. That’s a pretty big minus, considering how dirt-cheap 8 and 16 gig cards have become…and the simplicity of using ‘em as “floppies” for recorded video!

Oy. Okay, let me grab an 0111d-sk0001 memory card from whatever chair leg they’re currently propping up.

No, actually, I’ll plug in my iPod here. I’ve got disk mode activated and the Neuros has a standard USB plug, for use with any USB mass storage device. The video file won’t be added to the iPod library, of course, but it ought to write the file there just fine.

Hmm. It’s not showing up under what I presumed was the list of storage devices. I know it’s in target mode (the iPod screen confirms it).

Nope, I see “Shortcuts” and “Network.” It isn’t under “Network,” is it?

Nope.

I’m stumped. Let’s look through other menus. “Home,” and then “Settings.”

“Default Recording.”

Aha! This page (which offers a long list of specific settings, all the way down to the audio and video bitrates) says that it’s going to save to “USB.”

Cool, I approve these settings.

“No storage found, are you sure you want to save?”

Sigh.

Okay, let’s try another USB storage device. As it happened, today’s mail also brought a 32 gigabyte (yes, 32 gig) thumb drive. Can you see that, Mr. Neuros?

Ooookayyy…it seems to be recording to the thumb drive.

I think.

I mean, the access light on the drive is flashing and everything.

Incidentally, “Project Runway” started 20 minutes ago. Fortunately, the DVR started recording it at 10. Will restart it from the beginning and then simply sit back and enjoy the show…and afterwards, I’ll see if the Neuros actually did anything.

Incidentally(2) they made a real lamebrained mistake on the USB port: they put it in upside-down. There’s a USB logo above the jack and that would normally imply that you need to have the USB logo on the cable facing upward…but nope, that’s the wrong way.

Okay, I’m watching the show. Will pick this up after I press the “Stop” button on the Neuros remote.

Change of plans: I pressed “Pause” when the first commercial break came on. Cool. I see a familiar PVR-ish progress bar superimposed on the screen, indicating that it’s paused recording after 12 minutes and some seconds. Commercials are over, resume recording, and I see the seconds ticking by for half a minute before the bar disappears again.

I think I see the problem with the storage devices: I kept giving the Neuros incompatible volumes. First the SDHC card, then the iPod…which I belatedly realize is formatted with the Mac OS file system. I bet the Neuros is only compatible with FAT32 storage.

Makes sense. The thumb drive would certainly have come formatted as a FAT drive.

Back to the show. L8R.

Second commercial. Cool: I’ve just noticed that the green power light turns red when it’s recording. In pause, it turns green again. Nice touch.

Show’s over, I press Stop. “Finishing recording,” the screen says. “One moment, please.” After 30 seconds…I’m back at the Settings menu.

I exit out of the menu system completely. Let’s see what happens if I just press the “Record” button on the remote.

(…After I start “Reno: 911!” playing.)

Hmm. Pressing “Record” opens a menu where I have to confirm the recording. Wish it were true one-touch recording. Also seems odd that I appear to be back at the “Settings” menu when this happens. If this had been a true “Omigod! I should be recording this!!!” situation I would have missed the first five or ten seconds of it.

“Reno!” is over. Let’s see what I did.

Select “Play • Browse.” “USB” now appears in the list of storage places. Cool. Selecting it reveals a list of all files on the device…including a PDF and an executable that were already there to begin with.

Can it view the PDF? Select. Nope, but the menu allows me to rename, move, delete, etc.

“osd.mp4″ is the first recording, likely “Project Runway.” Select. It starts playing after a six-second pause “Please wait…”

Video quality is very good. “TV” preset is 640×480, 30 fps, about 2.5 kbps. I definitely see some degradation, but maybe this isn’t the best test; it was compressing compressed video.

Now I’m curious to see if it can record from DVD. I pop in a “House” disc. I choose that one episode where the diagnostic team orders way too many speculative and unnecessary tests while making two or three incorrect diagnoses and inflicting one life-threatening course of treatment after another before House has a dramatic sudden insight and makes the right call at last…and then I push the “Record” button.

Okay, if the Neuros is having problems with Macrovision or anything, it isn’t complaining yet. I shall valiantly watch the whole episode before I stop the recording.

“House” is over. (Turns out it wasn’t lupus after all.)

I don’t see any sort of menu item for “Safely eject the USB media” so I’m just going to yank it out (I’ve stopped the recording and the access light isn’t blinking). I’ll stick it in the USB port of this here eee PC, and see if I can play the files wot I find there.

Yup! They all play just fine in the eee’s built-in open-source media player — the “House” episode, too, meaning that commercial DVDs are but stalks of wheat before the device’s scythe.

The videos look and sound very good, too. Smart choice the OSD’s designers made, to have it “default” to such high-quality recording settings. It ensures that the first recordings a new user makes will be damned wonderful. If they’d chosen more conservative settings, first-time users might be left with the wrong impression about its max quality.

I yank the flash drive from the eee, plug it into the MacBook. Works great there, too. The Finder can QuickLook each of these three movies and plays ‘em in Quicktime Player and iTunes.

So there were a few initial rough spots, but most of those hiccups were easily explained. So far, this looks like a neat piece of gear. Next step will be to update to the very latest firmware and work my way through all of its features. But I like what I see so far and I’ll definitely be giving it a formal review in the Sun-Times in a few weeks.

I Amtrakked my way to a quaint little Dutch trading post over the weekend to do another bit for the CBS Early Show. Check ‘er out…I’m there to talk about my ideas about back-to-school tech for high schoolers:

Ach, it was a four-minute segment, I had about six minutes’ worth of stuff to say, and it really showed. Well, nobody died. I did kick the water cooler in the dugout afterward, metaphorically-speaking, but on the four-hour train rode home I replayed it in my head and decided that though it wasn’t my finest hour on national television, it wasn’t as bad as I was making it out to be. So I stopped writing personal letters of apology to the American viewing public after just 113 (from Aaban, Abrahaim G. through Aaban, Amos W.).

The important thing is that with this appearance, I’ve scored the Hat Trick: three segments on the Early Show in as many months. This means that I now feel like I can consider myself part of the CBS Family. And if, just before leaving the TV studio of a family member, you can’t fill your backpack with all of the Cokes from the minifridge in their green room…I ask you, just whose green room minifridge can you steal from?

I freely (and manfully) admit that the lamp was a bad impulse and I fully intend to return it if they ever invite me back.