Left, front view of the small but mighty Flip Video Mino. Right, Back view. You press the red button to start or stop recording. Click image to embiggen.

Criticizing the Mino is easy on paper. The video quality isn’t any better than what your point-and-shoot digital camera can do. It doesn’t look (or feel) like a “real” camera. It doesn’t take standard batteries. But the truth is, none of those things matter once you actually use one. The Mino is Pure Digital’s latest in a line of simple, affordable, extremely portable video cameras. And in that portability lies the key to the Flip’s success. The 640x480 video is far from Hi-Def, but video captured with your Mino will always be better than the moments you missed because you left your bulky video camera at home. And at just a hair over 3 ounces, there’s no reason not to carry the Mino everywhere.

With 2GB of internal memory, the camera can record an hour of video footage with audio, and there’s a handy time-remaining counter onscreen so you’ll know how much space you have left. Unlike its predecessor, the Flip Video Ultra, the Mino uses an internal rechargeable battery. You won’t be able to pop into a store for more power when you’re away from home, but the internal battery makes the Mino an entirely self-contained affair. Everything you need—including a USB connector and editing software—lives onboard the camera itself. In our tests, the switchblade-style USB connector was plenty sturdy, and we used it to connect the Mino to a variety of Macs without problems. After charging via USB, the Mino had enough juice for about four hours of use.

The included software offers rudimentary editing tools and exports directly to video-sharing websites. After installing the included video converter, however, we found it easier to just drag and drop the video files from the Mino directly into iMovie or another video editor.