Sony announces Bloggie Touch: Its answer to the Flip

Every company seems to feel the need to create a small video camera á la the Flip. It can even be argued that it’s one of the reasons Apple included the back-facing camera in the new iPod touch. Sony has now decided to get into that market as well, and it’s version looks quite impressive.

Sony’s entry is the called the Bloggie Touch. As you would imagine, the Bloggie Touch has a large touchscreen on the back, 3-inches to be precise. Unlike the Flip Slide HD, the Bloggie Touch doesn’t use the touchscreen for all the controls. In an almost un-Sony design choice, the Bloggie Touch has just one button on the back for controls, a big record button. There’s also two more buttons on the side, presumably for power and take photos.

Possibly most impressive about the Bloggie Touch is that it can shoot 1080p video, whereas most similar devices will only shoot in 720p. The large sensor means it’s also capable of taking large still images as well. The Bloggie Touch is capable of taking 12.8 MP still images, which is quite impressive. You can even take still images while you are recording video, which is an impressive feature. The device lacks any sort of opitcal zoom, instead it has only 4x digital zoom.

The Bloggie Touch is meant to make sharing your video and photos easily. The touchscreen seems to have a simple swiping method of moving through content, and that content can be marked for easy sharing on services such as Youtube, Flickr and Facebook when the Bloggie Touch is connected to a PC. This being Sony, of course the device uses it’s own software, and it’s only compatible with Windows computers. That is possibly the biggest downfall of the device, if it worked with a Mac, it’d be almost an instant buy for covering events.

The Bloggie comes in 4 and 8 GB models for $179 and $199, respectively. That comes in cheaper than the Flip SlideHD, but more expensive than the UltraHD and MinoHD sell for on Amazon.com. Your move, Cisco.

Read [Sony] Via [CNBC]