Exceeded My Expectations

Received my Vado HD today and I was pleasantly surprised. When the original ship date moved from Monday to Friday I got a little concerned, but apparently there was nothing to worry about. The Vado HD works great. I opened the package and immediately connected it up to my laptop via the USB cable to charge. If you press the Play button, it will go into fast charge mode, which I did. I then went out to dinner and when I returned it was already fully charged and ready to go. I took a couple of quick 2 minute videos of my son running around and playing and then hooked it back up to my laptop. The software to edit videos is located on the device, so you navigate to it through Windows Explorer and run the executable. The program loads up the videos you have on the device at which point you can watch them or run the stripped down Muvee software to add some music or effects to the video. All very easy and not too many things you can do, but it is quick and easy and can be done on anyone's computer just by plugging up the device. Pretty slick. Or you can just browse to the folder where the videos are stored on the device and run them straight from there with your default viewer (they are saved in .avi format). I then plugged up the HDMI into one of my free ports on my Panasonic 46 inch plasma and played the videos back through that. Very easy and since I can leave the HDMI cable tucked behind the tv, it makes playing video back for the family a very quick and painless thing to do. My son made me play his videos back quite a few times!! The quality of the video is actually better than I expected. I have never owned a pocket camcorder before, up to this point I have only used my Sony Handycam using digital 8MM. I was worried that I would not be happy with the quality of the video indoors, but it was perfectly acceptable for what I plan on using it for, which is to record family events. There is no zooming to speak of, but for me that is a good thing. I am always attempting to zoom in and out when I video and the result usually causes people to get sick when they watch one of my recordings! All in all, I am very pleased with the device. This being the first time owning one of these, I was shocked by the size and weight of this thing. I was expecting it to be small, but man, this thing is tiny and is light as a feather. Not crazy about the milky white cover that you comes with it, but it's better than nothing I suppose. If it annoys me too much I can always take it back off.