TRENDY GADGET

Not surprisingly, the success of Pure Digital's The Flip has inspired a slew of other inexpensive pocket-sized camcorders, including the Creative Vado and the RCA Small Wonder. But the latest one has something the others do not: high-definition recording.

Available at Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart is DXG USA's DXG-567V HD camcorder, a pocket cam that shoots 720p high-def video (1280 x 720, at 30 frames per second) and lets you connect the gadget to a PC's USB port with its built-in connector to directly upload video to a blog or YouTube.

The catch? The 32MB of built-in memory is solely dedicated to the "Rapid Blog Manager” software, so you'll have to pick up SD cards to store your video (a 1GB card can hold up to an hour of HD video, says DXG). At least you can keep a few of these postage stamp-sized cards in your pocket while, say, vacationing, instead of running back to your laptop at a hotel to dump the video and start again.

Available in black, red, pink and blue, the DXG-567V also ships with cables (composite and S-video) to connect to a TV, rechargeable AA batteries and ArcSoft's TotalMedia Extreme software to create, edit and watch videos.