Smile! Hands-On With the Most Candid Camera, the Looxcie Wearable Camcorder

To all you fanatic live bloggers, You Tubers, Tweeters, and Facebookers, the Latitude 131L Battery ultimate device to capture every second of your life has finally arrived. Today, Artiman Ventures launched the Looxcie, a $199 wearable camcorder that loops over the ear like a Bluetooth headset. In conjunction with an Android app, it allows users to capture short clips and immediately share and publish those videos on the web using the Looxcie smartphone application.

We wore the camera VGP-BPS9/B Battery around for a few days to try it out, and see how well it worked capturing the mundane and extraordinary.

Except for its obvious white boom extending forward, the camera looks like an oversized Bluetooth headset

. Still, it has a sleek spy-tech aura, like something you might see in Mission: Impossible. For sure, you won’t catch anyone unawares: We certainly got more than our share of odd looks from people as we wore it on the street. Overall the headset was comfortable, but over extended periods VGP-BPS9A/B Battery of time and movement from walking, the device would slip off and often needed readjusting.

Aside from its design, the Looxcie device is novel in that the camera is constantly recording, so users never have to worry about missing a key event. When a moment you want to remember occurs, a press of the instant clip button on the top of the device captures the last 30 seconds of video and stores it as a permanent clip. Using the free Android app, users can also immediately share their clips by email. For the most part, sharing instant VGP-BPS9 battery clips was easy to do but, occasionally the app crashed while saving the clip and was never sent. Also, we sometimes received an error message saying the clip was too big to be sent. Looxcie told us that these were beta issues, and would be resolved. The company also says that it will add a feature where you can instantly share your clips to Facebook and You Tube.

The video quality is average–HVGA (480×320) resolution at 15 frames per second; most smart phones capture better quality video. The camera can record up to 5 hours of footage, and can store hundreds of 30-second VGP-BPS9/S battery clips on the device. As a nice bonus, the camera is also a Bluetooth headset and allows you to answer calls and keep recording video at the same time

The accompanying Looxcie smartphone app (we installed it on a Samsung Vibrant) also turns the phone into a viewfinder, remote control, and editing tool for creating clips up to 30 minutes in length. The application is simple and user-friendly: It was easy to scroll though video footage and make our own custom-sized clips. The viewfinder is particularly helpful because you can also use it to turn the recorder on and off without having to fiddle with the record button on the device, and it good battery can be used to adjust to headset to make sure it’s level.

The camera works best in bright, well-lit areas such as the outdoors. Even though the camera adjusts automatically to different settings, it doesn’t capture nighttime or dimly lit areas very well. We also found that if we recorded while walking around, video was somewhat battery choppy and shaky. Also, while wearing the camera, we got a false sense that we were recording exactly what our eyes saw; when we looked back at the footage, objects we thought were in frame were off to one side or another.