Gadgetory

well hey this is David with a virgin this is the Sony Bloggie live it's reminiscent of the flip cameras that Cisco killed but it's actually better-looking than a lot of the flip models were it's made of brushed metal and it has the heft of a cell phone as you hold it it's got a power button and a shutter button for taking still photos on one side and there's a USB arm and a tripod mount on the bottom the USB arm is it's nice to have but it's actually really small and it takes up a lot of space on your computer when you plug it in there's an extension cord for the USB arm but it's kind of a pain to have to lug around another cable and kind of defeats the purpose of having it in the camera anyway there's a micro HDMI port underneath a port flap the LCD is touch enabled and actually worked pretty well it's not the best screen we've seen it mutes colors a little bit and it's pixels are really easy to identify but it gets the job done fine and the touch experience is actually better than we thought it might be the camera actually has Wi-Fi inside which lets it do things like share your videos and photos to Facebook or YouTube or Picasa and doing all that is really simple you just connect to a Wi-Fi network and then with a tap or two can put a video straight to your YouTube account if you want there are a couple of annoyances with doing that to save battery the Wi-Fi radio actually shuts off every time it's not being used so anytime you want to upload anything there's about a ten-second wait while you connect to the network before it'll even start uploading you can earmark videos or photos to be uploaded when you connect so you can set it to do them all at once and then only deal with connecting wants you can upload photos and videos to Facebook YouTube Picasa Flickr and dailymotion or you can use Sony's new player memories online service to upload and store everything in Sony's cloud and you can access it from any web browser but the most unique thing the blog you live can do is actually livestream footage from the camera it connects through quick and once you set up an account you can start streaming from the camera really quickly and you can see it in a web browser or on mobile apps users can share the stream or even can comment on the stream as they're watching it and you see comments on your camera as you're filming when you're done live-streaming your footage automatically gets uploaded too quick so you can see it later as a video there are a couple of challenges with the quick live streaming one it obviously requires Wi-Fi and two it only will live stream at a 320 by 240 resolution other than the connected features the Bloggie live really is as simple and as good a camcorder as most the flip cameras work it'll shoot video at 1080p at 30 frames per second or 720p at 60 frames per second plus a lot of different lower resolutions videos occasionally to contrast II which makes the whole video look a little bit darker than it should but generally especially for such a small and expensive device it looks really good the camera can also shoot 12 megapixel photos but it doesn't do it as well photos are fine in good lighting as long as you don't have any motion but as a still camera it's not nearly as good and in low-light pictures are basically unusable the Bloggie live comes with as much as 8 gigabytes of storage which is enough for about three hours obtain a DP video and that works out because that's about as long as the battery lasts to overall Bloggie life is a great camcorder it's as simple to use as any of the flip cameras and is probably better made but unless you really want the live streaming or the sharing features you probably don't need a camera that's expensive at $249 it's pretty expensive for this range of camcorders and Sony's made other Bloggie cameras like the touch and the Bloggie duo both of which shoot video and photos that are at least as good as the Bloggie live but they don't have some of the connected features so if you don't need the Wi-Fi and the connected features you're probably better off saving your money and going with one of those or looking for a flip cam