Recording video on your iPhone is no longer a luxury of just the folks with jailbroken phones or an iPhone 3GS. Apple has approved two separate apps this week in the App Store — Camcorder and iVideoCamera — both retailing for 99 cents. Unfortunately, there are memory considerations with these older models, so don’t expect much. Regardless, its a nice addition.
Camcorder (which is only available for a limited time at the 99 cent price) allows for the recording of videos at a 320×426 resolution. But don’t think of doing anything with these videos: currently Camcorder only allows for the recording and playback of the videos from within the application itself and nothing else. You can get to the videos somehow through peering through your iTunes data backups, but that takes some knowledge and patience.
Another downside according to TUAW are meager audio recording and a frame rate that is described as “slow.” Then again, how many cell phone videos have you seen that looked like they were shot with a Mini DV cam, so I do digress.
The second app, iVideoCamera, allows for more functionality on what you can do with your videos, however it comes with the tradeoff of even poorer recording quality and time constraints (160×213 resolution, 3 frames per second, and one minute maximum recordings). The ability is there though to save videos to the camera roll or share them to Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. The company behind the application, Laan Labs, says improvements to frame rate and longer recording times will be coming in a future update.
I haven’t seen anything on whether recorded videos in the camera roll then become available to send as MMS. If anybody has tried this, I think our readers (and myself) would want to hear about it. Occasionally, I’ve gotten the urge to send a video to somebody, but since I only have a iPhone 3G that’s not possible at the moment directly through the phone.
Helmet cams are popular among the extreme sports set as a way to capture live action shots from the perspective of the athlete him/herself. Contour is one of several companies offering these cameras, and already had a $280 1080p HD model out for quite awhile now. However, in an effort to differentiate itself from the competition, Contour has added GPS to a new higher end model which was released earlier this month.