The Flip is an attempt to produce a simple to use video camera and last weekend my friend Amanda D'Silva and I took a borrowed Flip (thanks Will!) for a test drive and recorded a short video review of it (while sitting in the pub - so apologies for the background noise). It's not really a device for the hard core geek, but is very simple to use and fun. The whole package is designed to be friendly to those less confident with technology with technical information consigned to the bottom of the box! The device will record sixty minutes of video and to record you just press a big red button on the back and point it at what you want to film. You can see how we found it by watching our video. 

You'll notice that the video quality varies, this is because the video was filmed partly on the Flip and partly on a mobile phone (which has a lower resolution). The Flip records with a resolution of 640x480 which is not as good as DVD, but still better than VHS. You can plug the unit directly into your TV, and the results were pretty good. Pressing a catch on the side of the unit makes a USB connector pop out. The software for the device is installed from the camera itself, but unfortunately it only came in Windows and Mac versions, being an Ubuntu user this meant I could not test it,

No doubt the big tech story of the week has been the release of the new Google Chrome browser, Google's new entrant into the browser wars. Like many others I downloaded this and gave it a go to see what the fuss was about. So first gripe, the current beta is only for Windows, although we are being promised versions for Linux and the Mac. This is an interesting decision, maybe it was taken as they don't want to aim the product at "geeks"? However, as an old manager of mine used to say, let's "park that thought" for the moment and look at the browser itself. Google came up with a great way to explain their new browser and its features; they did this in the form of a comic book and this can been seen at: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/. I'm not really into comics or graphical novels, but this made a refreshing change from a white paper or a powerpoint-type presentation, although I must admit my attention was starting to stray at the end! This is well worth reading as it explains the whole project and its features very well.