Flipping the camcorder market

Busi­ness Week dis­cusses the design process behind the Flip video cam­era, which has become an unex­pected hit. Engi­neers started with the most basic design they could imag­ine, and added lit­tle else. Users who want a cheap, sim­ple cam­corder and who don’t want cables or com­pli­cated doc­u­men­ta­tion are buy­ing Flips. It’s the best sell­ing cam­corder on Amazon.com.

David Pogue of the New York Times dis­cussed the Flip a few weeks ago, also.

• There’s no power adapter or recharge­able bat­tery. Reg­u­lar AA bat­ter­ies are used.
• Want to expand the onboard mem­ory? You can’t. There’s no mem­ory card slot. Flips are sold with either 30 min­utes and 60 min­utes of storage.
• Down­load­ing the video is easy: an on-board USB jack plugs directly into com­put­ers, and built-in edit­ing soft­ware pops up to help the user.

Howard Owens has posted a brief review with two videos he shot with a Flip.

Tagged as: design, technology, usability, video