I decided to buy the 2GB version of the uCorder today at “The Source”. They are selling the 2GB model at the price of the 1GB model.  The sales person had never heard of the device, but it showed up on his screen and in inventory, so he was able to retrieve one for me from storage.  I decided to go all out and purchase a 8GB mini SD chip.  This chip neatly slides into  a slot in the side of the device, bringing the entire internal memory up to 10GB.   This can give you enough space for up to 7 hours of video.

It is a pretty simple device.  A slide switch on one side lets you choose to use the device as an USB storage device or a Webcam. A similar switch on the other side if either off, on, or on with a light.  This light could be useful when recording in very dark places.  It is meant to clip onto a pocket (like a pen) with the camera lens facing out.  A simple push button on the back starts/stops recording.  You can elect to record just audio or both audio/video.

When recording in A/V mode it creates both a video and an audio file and stores them in a folder called uCorder.  I believe every 30 minutes it starts up a new files as a guard of losing data if you accidentally shut it off during recording.

It is advertised as a wearable device – and this it certainly is.  It is not much bigger than a USB stick.  You can slip it into your shirt/jacket pocket, like a pen, and with the lens pointing outward. It is pretty inconspicuous, even when on (unless of course you turn on the auxially light. This LED device throws quite a lot of light.   They also give you a lanyard, plus a clip/safety pin device to be able to attach the device to your body no matter what you may be wearing.  To be complete it also comes with a custom clamp to use  the uCorder as a webcam.

The video it produces is an AVI file (640 x 480) at up to 25fps and it can see to a distance of 25 feet.

Now I became interested in this device, since when I first read about it, I saw it as possibly as a first step towards recording your life as outlined by Bell and Gemmell in their text “Total Recall” .  They talk about technology to record your life, your whole life and store it in e-memory, as an adjunct to your biological memory.  So when I read it can record up to 7 hours, I thought it might be able to record “my day” – or at least 7 hours of it.  This turns out to be not quite true.  It is true the flash memory can hold up to 7 hours of video, but the battery will last only up to 2 hours, with a charging time of up to 3 hours. Hence, in a 7 hour continuous day, the best you could record is 4 of those 7 hours, assuming ou had access to a computer that could recharge your camera.  I’ll see how these numbers stand up in daily use.

Still- how does it work?  As I said, it is a simple device, so you take it out of the box, plug it into a computer with the included USB cord until fully charged, then turn it on and press the record button.  The videos are reasonable for the purpose I intended it for.  The audio seems clear and it picked up conversations in an entire room with no problem – other than my voice was dominant.  You can plug the device into the USB of your computer and copy the files into an appropriate folder on your computer.  it is best to view the video off your computer’s hard drive, so as to not experience the slow speeds of USB trying to view a file off the uCorder device.  Incidentally, it worked out of the box on my Macbook Pro laptop.

I suppose the one thing that might make this device more useful is to fix the short battery life.  Perhaps an outboard power pack that also clips into your pocket.  In its current form, it could still be very useful to record events in your life that take 2 hours or less.  Not quite the 24hr/day recording device as envisioned in “Total Recall” – but a step towards this goal.  It will allow me to experiment with my own e-memory. For less than $90 (cdn) that is a bargain.   Stay tuned.