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Sony has always taken a classier approach to its Bloggie line than Cisco with the Flip camcorders, and the Live may be the best-looking Bloggie yet. It's a rectangle with rounded edges and sharp corners, with a brushed metal front and a black back. The long, skinny rectangle feels more like a phone than a camera when you're holding it (though it's considerably thicker), and thanks to the one-button-below-display look it's legitimately reminiscent of an iPhone. On the front, there's a Sony logo, the f/2.8 Sony lens, and a single LED flash, and on the back there's a 3-inch LCD and the huge Record button. There's a mini HDMI port on the right side, which lets you output to an HDTV.The power button is on the left side next to the shutter release for taking still shots, and the two are annoyingly close together — I turned the camera off a number of times when I was trying to take a photo, and vice versa — but since the shutter button is enormous and the power button quite small, it's not as bad as it could be. On the bottom is a flip-out USB arm, which the Bloggie uses to both sync and to charge. The arm is a little difficult to access, since it only pops out if you press it directly in the middle, but it doesn't feel breakable like on some other cameras. It's short, too, which makes it hard to plug in and makes it take up a lot of adjacent ports as well — there's an extender USB cable, but that kind of defeats the purpose — but it's not too heavy or too thick to plug into a laptop USB port.
The Bloggie Live may be the better-looking camera, but Flip models were smarter in their design. If you hold the Bloggie candybar-style, like the Flip, you'll get vertically oriented video — it's the same thing that happens with an iPhone, giving you big black bars on the left and right of the image instead of showing it in proper widescreen HD format. You're meant to hold the camcorder sideways, with the Record button beside the screen, like a point-and-shoot. That's fine, but I'd wager it's not how most people will intuitively hold the device, and it also makes the Bloggie harder to use in one hand. It's clearly designed this way so that you get much more viewfinder real estate holding it sideways, but it makes the Bloggie a little more confusing to use.
The LCD is a 3-inch touch-enabled display that handles every operation other than recording video or turning on the camera. It's not the best LCD I've seen on a camcorder, with individual pixels readily visible and a tendency to mute colors a bit, but it does its job fine. Its responsiveness to touch is better than I expected, too: things like zoom rarely work well as on-screen toggles, but it was mostly responsive on the Bloggie Live.
The touch experience is helped by how simple the Bloggie Live's menus are — basically everything you'd want to do is a tap or two away, and it's usually a tap on a large icon that's hard to miss. Of course, the camera's feature set is fairly limited anyway, but whether you're earmarking a video for upload, or changing shooting settings, it's all really easy and intuitive. The one frustrating thing is how often the screen rotates: the keyboard always shows up in landscape mode, and the menus in portrait, so you're constantly flipping the Bloggie around in your hands to maneuver through it. Every time the screen rotates, it also turns off for a split second before turning back on in the proper orientation, which is a pretty jarring experience — it's also really sensitive, so there's a lot of screen flickering as you hold the Bloggie Live, even if you're not trying to turn it.
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