Flip, now owned by Cisco, has quickly carved out a name for itself in small handheld video cameras such as the Mino and MinoHD. Why bother with lumpen camcorders with huge lenses when you can instead wield something about the size of the Little Book of Calm? Its latest offering is the 8GB Flip UltraHD.

Priced at around £160, it adds more storage – up to two hours – plus remarkably detailed video capture, with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels and millions of colours, which it grabs at 30 frames per second. Much of these improvements are directly in line with Moore's Law: quicker, faster, cheaper. Flip has now moved to H.264 for video encoding, unlike the MPEG-4 AVI wrapper it used on its previous models such as the original Mino and MinoHD. That ups its compatibility with video-editing programs; AVI covers such a myriad of flie encoding wrappers that it's a gamble whether it will function with any given editor. H.264 is a known quantity which performs very well at all sorts of compression rates.

Flip is also paying attention to the little elements: you can choose to have the back (lens) side of the UltraHD in shiny chrome. Why? Because Flip discovered that its younger buyers wanted to be able to see themselves using it as they composed self-regarding videos for YouTube. The UltraHD's automatic light balance also showed its paces. I tried it at Wimbledon, where there's huge contrast in brightness between the sky, the court, and the seats; the automatic adjustment was almost instant; certainly if I'd had a tripod (rather than holding it in my wobbly hands) you'd have barely known how the light conditions above the court were changing as clouds scudded overhead. The only criticism is that at the speeds at which professionals play tennis, the ball "strobed" – the frame capture isn't fast enough to make the motion of the ball (which is of course travelling at around 100mph, or 160km/h) smooth.

But for all its improvements, Flip needs to watch its back: the arrival of video recording on the iPhone 3GS, plus that device's capability for a line-in microphone, is a dangerous challenge that can't be ignored.

The controls retain their simplicity: big red button to begin recording, two touch-sensitive controls to zoom in and out. For editing there's a simple trash button and reverse and forward buttons to scroll through the choices. Though the UltraHD is not, like its companions, a still camera, you can extract stills from the MP-4 stream very easily.

The zoom is adequate, though it would be good to have more control over focus: the camera's limits are revealed when you zoom in on an object more than about 30 feet away, at which point the conflicts of the aperture (which determines depth of focus) and the CCD sensitivity (which determines how bright the picture seems) become stark. It turns out that focus loses; that's where a larger camcorder, with its more expensive lenses ( and more expensive price tag, of course) wins.

Despite this, the UltraHD is a weapon of choice in almost every respect, but what it still needs is a microphone input so that it can be used for proper interviews. That may sound trivial, but it's going to become urgent quite soon. The addition of video to the iPhone, which also has a line-in for a microphone (free in the headphones, and perhaps coming through Bluetooth for a remote mic) means Flip has less time than it otherwise would. After all, everyone's improving as fast as Moore's Law at the moment. Flip needs to outpace it somehow.

Pros: small, light, high quality, good automatic light adjustment Cons: no line-in for sound; fuzzy at extreme zoom

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