New Flip MinoHD announced

Of Amazon's top five selling camcorders, versions of the Flip take four of the slots. The 4Gb MinoHD holds fourth position, but things never stand still for too long in the world of gadgetry and the MinoHD has just been supercharged. The second generation model features more memory, a bigger viewing screen with better resolution and a more powerful lens.

How do you make one of the world's favorite handy camcorders even better? Cisco, the company that now owns the Flip brand after acquiring it from Pure Digital earlier this year, has started by doubling the internal memory to 8Gb. This will give users around 120 minutes recording time. Improvement is also seen in the lens which now offers a fixed focus of 0.8m to infinity instead of 1.5m to infinity on the 4Gb version.

An upgraded video engine (version 3.5) has been added for improved performance. The anti-glare TFT viewing screen size has been increased too, now standing at a diagonal two inches, and its resolution has been bumped up to 960 by 240. Direct connection to a high definition TV is catered for with the inclusion of a HDMI output and a stereo microphone has been added too.

In common with the first generation offering, the new MinoHD comes in standard or user-designed colors, video quality is 720p at 30 frames per second, there's a 1/4.5" HD 2.2µm pixels CMOS sensor, a fast f/2.4 lens, digital zoom and a built-in speaker. Let's not forget the pop-out USB 2.0 arm (not Superspeed USB 3.0 yet folks) which gives the product line its name and the FlipShare software that has been highly praised for its ease of use and simplicity.

The second generation MinoHD Flip is available in the US only (at the moment) and has a recommended retail price of USD$230 (with the earlier HD version still available at USD$200 and the non-HD Mino standard at USD$150). Full details are available at the Flip website.

See below for a short video overview of the new Flip MinoHD: