In the age of the all-powerful pocket-phone, another little black box just for making videos could seem superfluous. After all, as well as being able to essentially run our lives, sing us to sleep and perhaps morph into crime-fightin’, tough-talkin’ super-robots, phones are now capable of capturing perfectly acceptable moving pictures.

If, that is, you only ever want to watch them on a screen about as big as a business card. I cannot be the only one who has whipped out my phone at some perfect moment, only to find that once transferred to my computer, everything comes out as a series of greyscale squares.

That’s where the Flip Mino comes in. As an object, it’s fairly unbecoming as it first slides out of its box. The big red record button is inviting, but other than that, it’s just a black box with a screen. But turn it on, and it lights up like a runway, all blue and twinkly. Lovely. It also has an awesome little flip-out USB key, which snaps upright with the nudge of a button at the side. I totally freaked out a friend of mine with it, asking him if it were a defect, then almost poking him in the eye with the USB key when he got close to check.

The Mino is weirdly light, which does little to inspire confidence. You find yourself tiptoeing around it, scared that if you were to drop it then it would shatter. But I guess the lightness is also a good thing, making up for the fact that it is a little more cumbersome than an average phone or iPod.

One of the advantages of its size is that it does have a flat bottom, which meant I could balance it on a book whilst I filmed a guy I’d just met in the pub reading a letter by James Joyce about farting. The film is surprisingly high-quality, even picking up smoke in fairly dark lighting conditions. The sound, too, was unexpectedly clear and could even pick up the groovy subtleties of a reggae gig I went to later that night.

From a marketing perspective, though, the Mino is hanging precariously between two different types of filmmakers – the casual one who just picks up the occasional funny moment, drunken antic or happy-slapping, and the more serious filmmaker who worries about focus and depth of field and that sort of stuff. For the casual enthusiast, a phone is still pretty much adequate and they are only going to get better, so there’s little point in having another box to weigh down your pockets, particularly one which costs around $160. And for the more sincere video jockey, the Mino just isn’t high enough quality. It’s decent, but it doesn’t approach the quality of even a middle-of-the-road camcorder.

In sum, the Mino has missed its moment. Though it was fun to have the camera for a couple of weeks, I did stop taking it out with me because it was ruining the cut of my coat and wasn’t useful enough to justify making me look like I had a hip tumour. A couple of years ago, prior to five megapixel phone cameras and ever-smaller handhelds, the Mino would have had its niche. Now, it’s barely present-proof, let alone future-proof.

~Chris Harding


The Scoreboard:

Looks: 6/10
Value: 4/10
Quality: 7/10
Convenience: 6/10

Overall rating: 23/40