Digital Home Thoughts: HP Enters the Crowded Pocket Camcorder Market with the V1020h

"The V1020h is a 720p high definition digital camcorder that combines performance, portability, and style. It captures videos of your life moments in great clarity and color. The V1020h fits easily in your pocket or purse making it great forrecording on the go."

The product name - the V1020h - is a mouthful, but the specs on this pocket video camera look, well, average. 720p video with a digital image stabilizer, h.264 format (.AVI format - can it be both?), 2x digital zoom, and digital image stabilization. And that's about it. It uses SD memory cards in addition to the built in 128 MB of storage (why even bother?), but doesn't support the new SDXC format - though with a 32 GB SDHC card, you could cram a lot of 720p video on to this thing. I'm frankly a bit surprised to see HP enter this market with nary a stand-out feature on this product. No 1080p, no optical zoom, no external microphone support, no optical image stabilization...and no mention of a bigger sensor for more high-quality low-light video (the latter is on my wish list for these small cameras).